This year’s Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award shortlist includes six Americans, five of them women, making it the first time the international prize has had an all-American shortlist and only the second time that women have featured so heavily on the list.

The 6 shortlisted writers and their entries are:

• F.A.Q’s by Allegra Goodman
• Herman Melville, Volume 1 by Victor Lodato
• The Metal Bowl by Miranda July
• Do-Over by Curtis Sittenfeld
• Life on Earth by Molly McCloskey
• Peanuts Aren’t Nuts by Courtney Zoffness

The winner will receive £30,000 and their five fellow shortlistees will each receive £1,000. The winner will be announced at a gala dinner hosted by EFG at Stationers’ Hall in London on Thursday 26 April. Read the shortlisted stories.

This year’s judges are Sebastian Faulks, Petina Gappah, Mark Lawson, Tessa Hadley and Andrew Holgate, Literary Editor of The Sunday Times.

More about the Award

The Award accepts entries of 6,000 words or under published in English from fiction authors from anywhere in the world who have been published in the UK or Ireland. The Award reflects The Sunday Times’ support for outstanding writing and the rich literary heritage of the newspaper, and the ongoing commitment of EFG, a leading international private bank, to the literary world. It is the Society of Authors second year of managing the prize.