Writers' & Artists' Short Story Competition 2013: shortlist announced.
With over 1,500 entries of an extremely high standard, this year’s short story competition has been our most hotly contested yet. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work!
However, tough as they were, decisions have had to be made.
The shortlist of writers whose stories are being considered for a cash prize of £500 and a place at an Arvon writing course are as follows:
- Grace Tsai
- Sam Bartlett
- Edward James
- Victoria Hunter
- Stephanie Percival
- Trystan Lewis
- John Wilson
- Gary Steven
- Neal Mason
- Amina Mughal
- Louise Chivers
- Adeyemi Onafuye
- Anthony Marshall
- Ceri-Lowe-Petraske
- Tricia Holbrook
- Fiona Salter
- Kathleen Taylor
- Jayne Thickett
- Rebecca Saunders
- Bethonie Waring
The winner and two runners-up will be announced by Tania Hershman at the Liars' League Short Story Special event on Tuesday 26th March. This event will be a celebration of the short story form, with Liars’ League actors reading stories from the competition.
For more information about how to attend the event, please click here.
For those of you unable to attend the event, the winner and runners-up of this year’s competition will be announced on www.writersandartists.co.uk on Wednesday 27th March.
Congratulations to all those that were shortlisted.
@Vishwadhipa Voore - do the math. 1500 entries each taking about ten minutes to read, that's 250 hours of effort or seven solid weeks of reading. It's stated that there is only one judge (who also has a full time job) so I think (and I may be wrong here?) that they didn't all get read. Unless of course they have additional readers who filter them?
Normally they ask for a synopsis and a mini bio so that they can filter without reading - common practice but they didn't this time.
Taking a nominal readers hourly rate of say £12 per hour it would have cost roughly £3,000 to read them then there is additional time and effort to shortlist, reread and award.
Sometimes only the first paragraph or two is read and to a skilful pair of eyes they can judge it on that alone. Alexander McKendrick used to judge scripts just on the first scene and I doubt he ever got it wrong. BBC Writer's Room read the first ten pages but reserve the right not to if it's obviously not going to make the cut.
The real truth lies with the fact that anyone reading a script / novel / short story etc just wants one reason only to put it down - I've done it myself. I've seen people in Waterstones read the marketing blurb then put the book down.
Also, it's very subjective I could love all the finalists and you could hate them all and if the same judges did it again with the same entries in a different mood they may well have chosen differently.
It's best to have absolutely no sentimentality over your own work and to view them objectively as simply words on paper. Feedback is very useful but it's usually only one persons often subjective view of your work.
do you guys really read all the entries?