SF author up against Booker winner for short story award
Chris Beckett joins Anne Enright on shortlist for the £5,000 Edge Hill short story prize
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 May 2009

A little-known science fiction writer is pitted against Booker prize winner Anne Enright in the UK's only literary award for the best short story collection.

Chris Beckett's The Turing Test, which features space ships, robots and time travel, is up against Enright's Yesterday's Weather, the follow-up to her Booker-winning novel The Gathering. Shena Mackay and Ali Smith, who have both been shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange prizes, are also in the running for the £5,000 Edge Hill short story prize with their respective collections The Atmospheric Railway and The First Person and Other Stories, along with the Irish writer Gerard Donovan, shortlisted for Country of the Grand.
"This represents the great diversity of the short story genre – what makes it distinctive," said the prize's founder Ailsa Cox. "Not many prizes put a science fiction author from a small press alongside the literary heavyweights ... These are people at the top of their game who are best known for their novels, but who actually really enjoy the short story form because of its virtuosity, its intensity."
Mackay, whose collection spans more than 20 years, said she was "delighted" about her shortlisting. "£5,000 is not to be sneezed at," she added. "I think it's wonderful to have a prize celebrating collections of short stories. It's always said that it's an overlooked form and it's having a little renaissance – in recent years the short story has really been recognised as a distinguished form of writing." collections don't sell. It's odd, because we're always being told what a short attention span everyone has nowadays, so you would have thought that
Beckett, who said he'd tried writing stories without the science fiction element, but found himself thinking "oh, just put a robot in it", was also pleased to be "recognised outside the field" of science fiction. "It's nice company to be in," he said. "I never understand people saying that short story short stories would be popular. [They're] different to a novel in that they're much more concentrated. It would be much more work to write an 80,000 word short story collection than an 80,000 word novel ... That's the beauty of the short story – it can be very rich, densely packed."

This year's prize is judged by James Walton, chair of Radio 4's The Write Stuff, author Claire Keegan, who won last year's prize with her collection Walk the Blue Fields, and Mark Flinn from Edge Hill university. The winner will be announced on 4 July.

The award was set up in 2007, and the inaugural prize was won by Colm Tóibín for Mothers and Sons. It is the only literary award in the UK for the best short story collection by a single author. The National Short Story competition, launched in 2005, rewards a single story.

The shortlist:

The Turing Test by Chris Beckett

Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan

Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright

The Atmospheric Railway by Shena Mackay

The First Person and Other Stories by Ali Smith