The 2017 judging panel will comprise novelist and Booker Prize winning author and short story writer Anne Enright, broadcast journalist and author Mark Lawson, Man Booker shortlisted author Neel Mukherjee, and Orange Prize winning novelist and short story writer Rose Tremain. Andrew Holgate, Literary Editor of The Sunday Times completes the line-up. The award is worth £30,000 to the winning writer.
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is a hugely respected international prize open to any novelist or short story writer from around the world who is published in the UK. Last year’s winner was Jonathan Tel, the first Briton to win the prize. Previous winners of the prize include three Pulitzer Prize-winning American authors - Junot Díaz, Anthony Doerr and Adam Johnson - as well as the celebrated Chinese American writer Yiyun Li, CK Stead from New Zealand and Kevin Barry from Ireland. Shortlisted authors have include Colum McCann, Petina Gappah, Hilary Mantel, Emma Donoghue, David Vann and Gerard Woodward.
The judges are looking for an outstanding English-language story of 6,000 words or under. The winner will receive £30,000, and the five shortlisted writers will each receive £1,000. The deadline for entries this year is 6pm (GMT) on 29 September 2016 and entry forms can be found here. A longlist will be announced in February 2017, followed by a shortlist of six in March 2017. The winner will be announced at a gala dinner in London on Thursday 27th April 2017.
Anne Enright comments:
The best gifts come in small packages. A good short story leaves nothing out, it is just the right size for itself, says something both old and unexpected, and leaves a wonderful silence in its wake. Writers do not produce short stories for money but for pleasure. They write a story because it is there. This competition puts value where the market does not; it celebrates the least of prose forms and the best.
Andrew Holgate comments:
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award has always been known for its striking judging panels, but this is one of the strongest and most experienced panels we have ever had, and I am hugely grateful to all four of my fellow judges for their belief in the prize and its aim to celebrate short fiction. The award, which has been generously sponsored right from the beginning by the private bank EFG, is now firmly established as one of the highlights of the literary calendar, and this year, the eighth in which it has been given, promises to be something special.
For full details of the Award visit: www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/shortstoryaward
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More about the judges
Anne Enright
Anne Enright was born and now lives and works in Dublin. She has published five novels including The Gathering, which won the Booker Prize in 2007, The Forgotten Waltz and The Green Road, which won Irish Novel of the Year in 2015. She has published two collections of short stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, and has had short stories published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and Granta. In January 2015 she was announced as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Andrew Holgate
Andrew Holgate has been the Literary Editor of The Sunday Times since 2008. Amongst many other prizes and awards, he has previously been a judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Betty Trask Award.
Mark Lawson
Mark Lawson is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He recently published his fifth novel, The Allegations, and his latest radio play, Holy Father, was broadcast earlier this year on BBC Radio 4. His work as a broadcaster includes Front Row and Foreign Bodies (Radio 4), Mark Lawson Talks To... (BBC4), and Late Review / Newsnight Review (BBC2). He is a critic and feature writer for The Guardian and theatre critic of The Tablet.
Neel Mukherjee
Neel Mukherjee's first novel, A Life Apart’ (2010), won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction. His second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award and won the Encore Prize for best second novel. His third novel, A State of Freedom, is out in June 2017.
Rose Tremain
Rose Tremain was one of only five women writers to be included in Granta’s original list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. Her novels and short stories have been published worldwide in 27 countries and have won many international prizes. Her 2014 collection of short stories, The American Lover, was shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award and 2016 saw the publication of her fourteenth novel, The Gustav Sonata. She was made a CBE in 2007 and in 2013 was appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. She won the Orange Prize in 2008 for The Road Home and the Whitbread Prize for Music and Silence.
More about the Award
Launched by Lord Evans of EFG Private Bank and Cathy Galvin of The Sunday Times in 2010, and was co—founded in 2010 by Lord Matthew Evans, then chairman of EFG, and Cathy Galvin of The Sunday Times. Lord Evans died earlier this year.
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the richest prize for a single short story in the English language. Worth £30,000 to the winner, the international annual award aims to promote and celebrate the excellence of the modern short story, and has attracted entries from some of the world’s finest writers.
Download the full press release