From The Sunday Times
Longlist for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award announced in London

Rose Tremain,(left), a former Orange Prize winner, is on the longlist...as is New Zealand author C.K.Stead, right.

A former glamour model who now writes erotica is one of 20 writers long-listed for the first Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.
Kay Sexton, who began modelling for risqué calendars as a teenager, is on the list with such well-established authors as Rose Tremain, AL Kennedy, Helen Simpson and the poet Jackie Kay.

“The great thing about doing short stories is that you can play around with ideas,” said Sexton, whose story Anubis and the Volcano is a tale set in Iceland and Egypt.
Sexton fell into writing by chance about 10 years ago when she was asked to write a short story for a proposed anthology while working for the charity International Tree Foundation. The anthology was never published, but Sexton found she had a talent for writing.

She now writes mainly for magazines and specialist publications. Her erotica is published under the pen name Carmel Lockyer and she also writes science fiction under the guise of Ren Holton.
Sexton is joined on the long list for the prize, which is open to published authors from anywhere in the world and carries a prize of £25,000, by Simon Robson, a Rada-trained actor, and Charles Mosley, former editor-in-chief of Burke’s Peerage.

Tremain, who won the Orange prize in 2008 for her novel The Road Home, said: “It’s a tough form of writing because you must have cohererence in just a few thousand words, while with a novel you can have some ‘bagginess’.”

The writers — 13 women and 7 men – range in age from 28 to 78 and live around the world, as far as New Zealand, America and Zimbabwe.
The full longlist:

• Richard Beard - James Joyce, EFL Teacher
• Nicholas Best - Souvenir
• Sylvia Brownrigg - Jocasta
• John Burnside - Slut's Hair
• Will Cohu - Nothing But Grass
• Joe Dunthorne - Critical Responses To My Last Relationship
• Petina Gappah - An Elegy for Easterly
• Jackie Kay - Reality, Reality
• A.L. Kennedy - Saturday Teatime
• Adam Marek - Fewer Things
• Charles Mosley - Constraint
• Chris Paling - The Red Car
• Ron Rash - Burning Bright
• Simon Robson - Will There Be Lions?
• Kay Sexton - Anubis and the Volcano
• Helen Simpson - Diary of an Interesting Year
• C.K. Stead - Last Season's Man
• Rose Tremain - The Jester of Astapovo
• Gerard Woodward - Legoland
• David Vann - It's Not Yours

The competition is a new annual literary prize which builds on the success of a weekly short fiction slot in The Sunday Times Magazine.

Judges including Nick Hornby, who was Oscar-nominated for his screenplay adaption of fellow judge Lynn Barber’s autobiography An Education, chose from 1,152 entries.
Award-winning author Hanif Kureishi, another judge, said reading the longlist entries had been a “fascinating and stimulating exercise”. “I’ve learnt a lot about what people are thinking and writing about at the moment.”
The other three judges are novelist AS Byatt, Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate and Lord Matthew Evans.

The shortlist will be announced on 7 March and the prize awarded at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on 26 March.
Readers will have the chance to hear extracts from all shortlisted stories at a series of events running at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. They will also be able to discuss the genre with leading writers and the judges themselves.

Peformer and writer Alexei Sayle, who has contributed short stories to the magazine, will kickstart the events over a glass of wine on Tuesday 23 March.
For more details go to www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk.