PhD student becomes the youngest ever winner of the BBC National Short Story Award

At 26, D W Wilson has become the youngest ever winner of the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for his story ‘The Dead Roads’. He was presented with a cheque for £15,000 by this year’s Chair of Judges, broadcaster Sue MacGregor, as the news was announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row from an event at The Free Word Centre in central London.

Wilson was born and raised in British Columbia before coming to England as the recipient of the inaugural MAN Booker Prize Scholarship for the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, where he is now a PhD candidate in Creative and Critical Writing.

Jon McGregor was runner-up for the second year in a row with his story ‘Wires’, receiving a cheque for £3,000. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways To Begin, and Even The Dogs, which between them have won the Somerset Maugham Award and been twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The other shortlisted authors, M J Hyland, Alison MacLeod and K J Orr, each received £500.

The 2011 judging panel was chaired by BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Sue MacGregor. She was joined in her deliberations by poet and author Joe Dunthorne, author and journalist Geoff Dyer, Tessa Hadley, whose most recent novel is The London Train, and Editor of Readings, BBC Radio, Di Speirs.