National Short Story Prize

The shortlist

The following five authors have been shortlisted for the inaugural National Short Story Prize

Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta was born in Canterbury in 1971. Among his first memories are the shadowy pillars of the cathedral, in whose bookshop, on one early visit, his parents bought him a children's version of the Canterbury Tales.

Dasgupta grew up in Cambridge. He studied French literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and media studies at the University of Wisconsin. He then joined a marketing firm, which took him from London to Kuala Lumpur, and then to New York, where he ran the company’s US operations. He now insists that business is a very good training for writers.

In 2001, Dasgupta moved to Delhi to write. He had made some initial sketches for a story cycle that would use folktale and myth as the language to explore the experiences and forces of globalisation. The book that came out of this, Tokyo Cancelled, was published by HarperCollins in 2005. It has so far been translated into eight languages, and one of the stories is currently being adapted for film by Australian screenwriter and director Robert Hutchinson. 'The Flyover' is taken from this book.

Dasgupta writes for several periodicals, including the Guardian and the New Statesman, and is working on his second novel.

'The Flyover'

'There was once a young man in Lagos named Marlboro,' Dasgupta’s story begins, and we enter the world of the Belogun Market, teeming under the city’s concrete flyovers. Ignorant of his father’s identity, and abandoned by his mother, Marlboro only has a talent for knowing other people’s business. Which is why he attracts the attention of local businessman, Mr Bundu, who draws Marlboro deep into the corrupt heart of the local economy and towards the culmination of his fantasies of escape.

Michel Faber

Novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber was born in Holland. He moved with his family to Australia in 1967 and has lived in Scotland since 1992. His short story, 'Fish', won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1996 and is included in his first collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award.

His first novel, Under the Skin (2000), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and he has also won the Neil Gunn Prize and an Ian St James Award. Other fiction includes The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (1999), a novella, and The Courage Consort (2002), the story of an a cappella singing group. His most recent novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), creates a vast panorama of Victorian England and tells the story of Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute.

A master of kaleidoscopic tones and styles, Faber is equally at home in the sprawling possibilities of the novel as he is in the concentrated realm of the short story—the form which allows him, he says, to get into 'as many different universes as possible.' His most recent short story collection is The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories (2005), which includes 'The Safehouse.'

'The Safehouse'

A man wakes up far from home, destitute, with no knowledge of his past, and uninterested in whether he lives or dies. On the front of his T-shirt there is writing which explains who he is, providing a contact telephone number. He can’t be bothered to read the script. There are others in the city who also have T-Shirts with their life stories printed on them. When there’s nowhere else to go, they all eventually end up together, in the Safehouse.

James Lasdun

James Lasdun is a British writer now living in the United States.

He has published two collections of short stories, The Silver Age and Three Evenings; and three books of poetry, A Jump Start, The Revenant, and Landscape With Chainsaw, which was short-listed for the 2001 Forward Prize. With Michael Hofmann he co-edited the anthology After Ovid.

His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. His awards include the Dylan Thomas Award for short fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, and first prize in the 1999 TLS/Blackwells Poetry Competition. He has taught Creative Writing at Columbia, Princeton and New York Universities.

Lasdun co-wrote the screenplay for Sunday, starring David Suchet and Lisa Harrow, which won both the Best Screenplay and the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature at the Sundance Film Festival of 1997. His story 'The Siege' was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci into the film Besieged. Lasdun's first novel, The Horned Man, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2002. His second novel, Seven Lies, is also published by Cape, this year.

'An Anxious Man'

Joseph Nagel is worried about money. Not that he has too little. In fact, he and his wife have enough to invest, enough to form the basis of real riches. But as his wife’s investments prove less than sure-handed, Joseph begins to experience anxieties that teeter on the edge of hysteria. Then on holiday in Cape Cod, they meet another family with a certain amount riding on investments, and Joseph allows his kids a sleepover with their new friends. Next morning, they have all vanished.

Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain has been publishing short stories since 1981. She has said of the short story: 'it’s an exacting art. It demands a poetic coherence, a highly-tuned feeling for what’s essential and what’s superfluous.' She won the Dylan Thomas Short Story Award in 1984. She says she learned more about the form when teaching a course on The Great American Short Story at Vanderbilt University in 1988 than in the rest of her working life.

Tremain has written nine novels. She has won the Sunday Express book of the Year Award (for Restoration, also shortlisted for the Booker Prize), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger in France (for Sacred Country), and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award (for Music & Silence). Her last novel, The Colour, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. These novels have been published in 22 countries and Restoration was filmed in 1995. Films of Music & Silence and The Colour are now in development.

In autumn 2005 an acclaimed new collection of her stories, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was published by Chatto & Windus. 'The Ebony Hand' forms part of this collection.

'The Ebony Hand'

It is the eerie, closed world of an England just vanished that emerges through the unfulfilled life of the inappropriately named Mercedes. After her sister dies, and her brother-in-law checks himself into the local madhouse, their daughter Nicolina is taken in by 'Auntie Merc.' It is her chance to find herself as a mother. But life hands out only cruelty to the vulnerable, and the meanness of the English village spirit takes away all of Auntie Merc’s hopes, right down to her strangely treasured ebony hand.

William Trevor

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland in 1928. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958. His fiction, set mainly in Ireland and England, ranges from black comedies characterised by eccentrics and sexual deviants to stories exploring Irish history and politics, and he articulates the tensions between Irish Protestant landowners and Catholic tenants in what critics have termed the 'big house' novel.

He is the author of several collections of short stories, and has adapted a number of his own stories for the stage, television and radio. These collections include The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967), The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (1972), Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1975) and Beyond the Pale (1981). His early novels include The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969). The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983) both won the Whitbread Novel Award, and Felicia's Journey (1994), won both the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Sunday Express Book of the Year awards.

William Trevor was awarded an honorary CBE in 1977 for his services to literature, and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994. He is also a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He was awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize by the Arts Council of England in 1999 in recognition of his work. He lives in Devon.

The Hill Bachelors (2000), a collection of short stories, won both the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Short Stories and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction in 2001. The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. William Trevor's latest book, A Bit On the Side (2004), is a collection of short stories on adultery. He says: 'My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.'

'Men of Ireland'

Here William Trevor seizes the contemporary reality of a country in transition, glimpsed through the jaded eyes of a homeless man who can never properly leave home. Back in Ireland for the first time in 23 years, Donal Prunty has thought of a last ploy he might be able to pull off in his home village. All he needs is the attention of his old priest, and an opportunity to talk — to summon up the long shadow of guilt that still lies over the Irish priesthood and its dealings with boys like Prunty.

Download the press release, author biographies and story précis

Press release (Microsoft Word .doc format 41Kb)
Author biographies and story précis (Microsoft Word .doc format 31Kb)

Read about the shortlist in the Guardian and the Independent