The BBC National Short Story shortlist: my assessment of the stories

Further to my earlier post about the BBC National Short Story shortlist, here are my thoughts now that I've actually read and listened to the stories, and also to the Radio 4 interviews with the authors.

Because of other commitments, I listened to one of the stories before I read it, and vice versa with the others, so I'm not sure it's possible to make true comparisons between the stories, since, as Radio Producer Michael Fox commented to me on Facebook, reading and listening are very different experiences, and I'd say it's likely that the experience of a story you have first becomes the primary one, affecting your later experience of the same story in a different medium. Here goes, however.

I have to say that not one of the five stories left me emotionally moved or aesthetically admiring as winning and shortlisted stories of earlier years have done - say, Kate Clanchy's 'The Not-Dead and the Saved', Jon McGregor's 'Wires' or Sarah Hall's 'Butcher's Perfume': these were stories I found moving precisely because they are dynamic and innovative at the level of language and/or structure. Every one of this year's crop was written by an author known so far for novels rather than for short stories, and this seemed to be reflected in stories that, in the majority, were not language-dense. At least three of them operated, on first impression, more on the level of plot than on that of language or innovative structure and used a predominantly conventional 'tale-telling' mode or tone.

One of the least conventionally 'tale-telling' in authorial tone was 'Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets', by Zadie Smith. This was the story I first encountered on the radio. Ironically, as the Radio 4 interviewer pointed out, Smith is a writer of pretty hefty novels, and she has only just begun writing stories. She expressed in her interview a delight with the opportunity that a short story provides to be more glancing and implicit, to get away from explication and a knowing authorial third-person. However, the implicitness of her story as it was broadcast, a story about an ageing Brooklyn drag queen stepping into a shop to buy a corset and into a maelstrom of racial prickliness - did not reside in linguistic or structural patterning so much as the dramatic mode which in fact Smith uses in her novels, a prose heavy on dialogue and action in which the meanings are conveyed implicitly in the actions and the junctions between the speeches. While we were not always told what was going on in the characters' minds, and had to infer it from their speeches and actions, there was nevertheless in the broadcast that strong sense of an author pulling the strings and forcing the characters together for her own indisputable ends/meanings, which Smith with characteristic frankness identified in her own novels. The broadcast version of the story, in its essentially dramatic mode, while showing the subtlety and uncertainty of social interactions, is unquestioning about the nature of reality - in other words, realist, something which seems echoed in its title, which, however McSweeney-ironic, could smack of the patrician and old-fashioned.

On the other hand, when I listened to the broadcast I was actually confused about those authorial meanings: as the reading unfolded I was clear that something subtle and uncertain was going on between the characters, but I wasn't clear what, and although by the end I knew there had been a misunderstanding, I was left feeling that I'd missed something about its precise nature, and why it had happened, and also wondering if the narrative treatment of Miss Adele's ultimate distress were simply melodramatic. The reading by Noma Dumezweni was excellent: she did great service to the dramatic mode, brilliantly realizing the voices for which Smith has such a wonderfully acute ear, and the whole thing was indeed vibrant and concrete with a sense of social reality. Dramatically-constructed stories, as I have said previously on this blog, seem best suited to radio broadcast, but inevitably a reader of the dialogue on the page approaches the story without this help, and I wondered whether someone doing so would have had quite this satisfying and immediate sense of vibrancy. However, reading the text later showed me that the radio broadcast had indeed ironed out something quite crucial. Inevitably, all of the stories were cut to fit the 35-minute slot, and not only did I now find that linking moments clarifying the situation on a simple factual level had been excised from the broadcast version of this story, but there is, I discovered, a recurring structural element outside the action and dialogue that operates with the essential short-story implicitness for which Smith was aiming, but which was cut. Every so often the prose, located in Miss Adele's viewpoint, takes on a free indirect mode in which we are carried back via her intimate memory to her childhood, memories which are overlaid on the current situation and which, by implication, colour Miss Adele's view of it and of the other characters, and motor her own responses. In a few brief (unfortunately easily excised) strokes this gives Miss Adele a whole painful deep history, clarifies the way she is dealing with the present situation and the responses of others to her, and makes her consequently far more moving. It gives the story an interiority and a deeper, resonant and more satisfyingly psychological meaning than the more 'out-there' pantomime style of the broadcast conveys, makes it less realist and indeed less linear. There is a kind of disruption in this leitmotif (so you can see why it might have been ironed out) - it disrupts the otherwise stage-set realism of the story - but it's an important, aesthetically dynamic disruption, essential to the story's meaning which was lost in the simplification and emollience of broadcast.

Smith's story wasn't the only one of the five suffering from this kind of flattening via broadcast. It seems to me that a competition that invites stories of up to 8,000 words - which is long for a short story - yet shoehorns the winners into a 35-minute broadcast slot creates a troubling dynamic, and it's perhaps disturbing that, in a venture dedicated to nurturing the short story as a form, the means of dissemination of the winners suppresses those very characteristics of subtlety and liminality of which the short story is uniquely capable - and when, if a story is truly successful, every word should count.

Precisely the same thing happened with Tessa Hadley's story 'Bad Dreams'. As was pointed out in her interview, of the five shortlistees she has the strongest track record of short-story writing, and I felt that this showed in the economy and mode of her story, which depended entirely for its meaning on this kind of leitmotif patterning. 'A child woke up in the dark', the story begins, and later a new section begins: 'Her mother woke up early, in the dawn' - an echo which not only signals a connection between what has happened to the child in the meantime and the mother's situation or consciousness, but in its changed diction alerts us to consequence, and to something changed or about to. As the shortest, Hadley's was the story that was least cut, but those cuts were, I think, devastating. It's a story about those things in our consciousness we suppress, those things we either don't see or refuse to see about our relationships and our lives, and what carries this meaning with resonance, and indicates by metaphoric implication why the odd things that happen in the story happen, is a riff on invisibility and the inability to see in the dark, most of which was stripped right out for the broadcast. I read the story before I listened to it, so it's not really possible for me to say what impression I'd have got if I'd heard it first, but I suspect a lot was lost. A literal and prosaic reading of the story might lead one to make such deletions - after all, we know it's dark, the first sentence tells us! - but a good short story doesn't just operate on that banal level of information, and those rhetorical devices of repetition and variation carry the psychological and existential dimensions of a story, and hence its emotional impact.

It's tempting as a consequence to dismiss this competition as being in thrall to commercial pressures for realism and simplicity, but the fact is that at the London Short Story Festival in June, Di Spiers, one of the judges and indeed BBC Radio Books Editor, expressed a frustration with the widely-held view (previously expressed on this blog) that the stories best suited to radio are conventional, and that conventional stories are thus best suited to this competition. She wished they received more innovative submissions, she said, and indeed I think this is reflected in the fact that Lionel Shriver's 'Kilifi Creek' was chosen as this year's winner. Although it's clogged with abstract circumlocution, and everything is spelled out - no glancing implications here - and although this was one story where, in my view, the huge cuts for broadcast improved it no end, it was actually interestingly experimental in its conceit, and in spite of the conventionally authorial tale-telling voice, not in the least realist; in fact it was anti-realist. Focusing (pretty uneconomically, in my view) on a moment in a woman's past when she almost drowned, and then moving on to consider how that moment plays out in her later life and consciousness, the story ponders questions about chance, reality and our grasp on that reality that did intrigue me in spite of my dislike of the pretentious and, in my view, self-regarding authorial tone.

I did find the two remaining stories conventional and realist, however. Rose Tremain's 'The American Lover' moved back and forth between the past and the present as a woman injured in a road accident recalls her youthful affair with an older man and traces the route from that to her present situation, but within the flashback sections the prose descends into a stark tale-telling mode (this happened, then that happened), with little subtext or resonance, that failed to keep my attention or to make for me convincing connections between those past events and the present. Although one can make a logical argument for those connections, which Tremain did indeed do in her interview, within the story they weren't organic, and it felt to me that the woman's accident was not the inevitable consequence of the early events, but could have happened anyway or indeed could have not happened. In her interview, like all of the shortlistees, Tremain was asked how autobiographical the story was. In my view that's a question that, for literary as well as personal reasons, shouldn't be asked of an author in public, and here it contributes to a suspicion of populism, a pandering to the populist tendency to read fiction as autobiography. But in Tremain's case it was illuminating: yes, the early part was autobiographical, she confessed. We can conclude (in fact, I think she may have actually said) that the woman's injury wasn't, that this had been devised as a symbol of the emotional damage at the heart of the story, and it felt to me just that: something artificially added on and not earned by any deeper resonance elsewhere in the story. This - very much the longest story in the bunch - was another where the cuts often actually improved the prose, removing repetitions that added nothing to the story's deeper meaning and thereby improving the pace. Even so, once again there were omissions that did detract from the story, once again removing crucial elements that carried the meaning. The 'present-day' level of the story takes place in 1974, and references to the miners' strikes, omitted from the radio version, may have seemed, on a prosaic reading, to be dispensable (and maybe even unsuited to a tale rooted in sixties sexual freedoms and callousness), but they create a contrasting atmosphere that underlines, on an important emotional level, the story's concern with emotional hardship, dissolution and strife. In one scene omitted from the broadcast, the protagonist receives a slap on the face from a nurse and '...the mark became a bruise and the bruise took a long time to fade', one moment in the past time-level that is truly emotionally resonant, symbolic of lasting emotional damage. This was cut for the broadcast, leaving the story even less resonant for me than the text version had been.

Francesa Rhydderch was the one less-well-known of the five, graduate of a BBC creative writing course, and although I'm very keen to see non-'celebrity' authors making it to the shortlist in this competition, I'm afraid her story did seem to me that of someone still learning the art. Her story, set in the 1920s in a small town in Wales, deals with events when a professor comes to lodge in the house of a taxidermist and the effect he has on the taxidermist's daughter. It seemed to me to suffer from a thematic uncertainty that was underlined in the promotion. Listening to her radio interview, I heard that the story was about several things: taxidermy as an interesting and detailed subject in its own right, death, resurrection, the position of women in 1920s Britain and 'the process of creation', but there was no mention of the one thing the general publicity tells us it's about, ie a young girl's sexual awakening. In her interview Rhydderch spoke of 'putting two things together' (the memory of the young girl's brother killed at the Somme, and taxidermy). I can see that in theory the process of taxidermy might be a symbol for keeping lost or dead ones alive, but this notion wasn't in my view borne out by the workings of the story, in which the man whose province is taxidermy won't use the dead brother's name and replaces his presence in his room with the results of his craft, while the character who is keeping the son's memory alive, the daughter, is for the main bulk of the story excluded from the taxidermy processes (this was the part of the story that concerned women's status), taxidermy being for her a focus of exclusion and denial, and in one crucial scene, of discomfort. In fact, a contradictory notion to that of taxidermy as loving resurrection is perhaps suggested (and vividly prefigured in an early reference to the mother's almost savagely gutting a goose): that the heartlessness of the professor was symbolised in the emptiness of the eviscerated taxidermy specimens. Furthermore, it is the taxidermy chemicals that the daughter uses to try and commit an act of poisoning. Neither did I find, beyond this mechanical plot connection, any organic or thematic connection between either the brother's death or taxidermy with the other strand, that of the daughter's sexual interest in the professor. I was unconvinced by her attempt at poisoning and remain to this day unsure of whom she was chiefly trying to poison (the professor, for betraying her with her mother, or her mother for having sex with the professor, or both). Much was made in the interview of Rhydderch's research into taxidermy, as if this were the core of the story, but, significantly, scenes describing the processes were drastically cut for the broadcast of the story, including the very passage we heard, uncut, during the interview. This was another long story (over 6,500 words), and it was interesting that Rhydderch said she'd felt that the 8,000 word allowance of the competition gave her an opportunity to 'cover more bases' and (ironically, in view of the fact that I found the character's motives unclear) to go into more depth. I found the result unfocussed and loose, and in fact the radio editing did much to correct some infelicities of prose. All of the five stories but Smith's were set wholly or chiefly in the past, but in spite of Rhydderch's statement that she doesn't want her stories set in the past to be thought of as historical, and wants rather to achieve for them a 'modern emotional idiom', (and in spite of the interviewer's strong agreement that this story was indeed timeless), I found her story the most historical in tone and atmosphere. I'm not sure therefore that, in the context, I understand her phrase, and the fact that her fairly ordinary characters living in rural Wales in the 1920s dine on goose with 'Jerusalem artichokes, glazed parsnips and ... celeriac mash' (a line judiciously cut for the broadcast) seemed to me, hailing as I do from rural Wales, nothing more than an anachronism.

In conclusion, I'd say that there are strange tensions created by the parameters of this competition. One could view the fact that longer stories are encouraged for submission and seem to be favoured in the judging as implying that the judges are admirably above the requirements of radio, and that the subsequent need to squash the stories into less than 35 minutes (intros, credits and music taking up at least a couple of minutes) (I'd say around 4,000 words) is an unfortunate byproduct of their literary freedom. However, the suspicion arises that longer stories are simply favoured as they can be sure to fill up the slot and can always be cut (and, although no minimum word limit is stated, it doesn't look in that case as if stories shorter than 4,000 would have stood much chance). Yet, as I have said, the essence of the short story is economy: the best short stories are often indeed much shorter than 4,000 words, and a good short story should be difficult, if not impossible, to cut without serious loss. There's a novelistic feel to this shortlist, not simply because the authors are also novelists, and although it succeeds splendidly in drawing public attention to the short story as a form, it fails to showcase properly its unique possibilities, or the ways in which those are indeed being explored by writers in the UK today.

BBC National Short Story shortlist

I knew in mid-August, when I received an email from Booktrust's publicist, intended to get me excited as a blogger about the announcement of the shortlist for the BBC National Short Story award a month later, that of course once again I had failed to make it. The email clearly meant that the shortlist had been chosen and shortlistees informed - the publicity machine and publication and recordings requiring at least a month's preparation. Actually, I never expect to get anywhere in this competition, and most years I think wearily, 'Is it really worth my bothering to go through the motions?' And the main thing that puts me off is the bit on the form where you have to say whether you are the author or the author's publisher entering the story. I always wonder: why is this distinction made such a fuss of? Why are publishers allowed to enter stories on behalf of authors? The entries aren't anonymous (you have to declare your most recent publications - or your publisher has to); if you're a sifter, or a judge, how likely are you to overcome the temptation (conscious or unconscious) to be influenced by the endorsement of an established publisher? One year, I asked my hard-pressed small publisher to enter me: she generously and readily agreed, but I know it was a huge hassle on top of all her other work, and I didn't feel it was fair to do it again (I suppose the big publishers have publicists etc to deal with all the form-filling bother), and I'm left thinking every year: do I even stand a chance whatever the standard of my story?

Well, I guess one should reserve judgement unless one knows the ins and outs of the process, but this year's shortlist - Zadie Smith, Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremain, Tessa Hadley and the one less-well-known author Francesca Rydderch - even had chair of judges Alan Yentob being asked on Front Row last night if the reputations of the authors had influenced the judging. Of course Yentob denied it: these were simply the best stories, he insisted, and said (I think - I was driving as I was listening) that one might well expect such proven masters of fiction to produce brilliant stories, which is undeniably true.

But the press release I received makes me uneasy. We are told in the accompanying email that the shortlist is 'glittery', and the press release refers, in popular-culture terminology, to an 'all-star lineup', as well as stressing as a virtue the fact that some of these authors have been shortlisted previously. It's understandable: I know from my own time as an editor of a literary magazine the temptation - indeed necessity - of drawing readers (to serious literature) with big names and suggestions of glamour, and I'd like to think that that's all that's going on here, and that those in a position to promote the short story as a form aren't ending up sacrificing it on the altar of 'celebrity' or the status quo.

Stories as jokes

Good points in a Guardian article by Kirsty Gunn in response to comments by Clive Anderson, chair of the judges for the BBC International Short Story Award, the shortlist of which has just been announced. Anderson's chief comment, she reports, is 'that what the short story must have – its overriding and most important feature – "is a twist" ', an old-fashioned and extremely limited view of the short story and its possibilities. Anderson is of course not really making a considered literary point here: he's the front man for a marketing campaign, and in such circumstances there's always a rush to the lowest common denominator and the populist. The one shortlisted story I've heard so far, Lucy Caldwell's Escape Routes, doesn't appear to me to conform to his dictum, and I can't imagine that such a criterion would inform the choice of judge Michele Roberts, for instance. Still, as Gunn implies, this possible misrepresentation by Anderson is the problem:

That speaks to a larger concern – which is the way literature in the UK is constantly made safe and understandable, diluted and commoditised, by those who don't have the first idea about form or voice or point of view or emotional landscape or any of those things real writers concern themselves with before they even sit down and think about inventing a story.

As Gunn also implies, the comments of the chair of judges for a prize of such prestige will be taken as literary, and a statement of serious intent - or not serious, as Gunn points out: 'A great short story,' says Anderson, 'can combine the structure of a good joke with the impact of a miniature masterpiece', and Gunn comments: 'It's what our culture wants to do to art: break it down, play it for laughs. Make us feel we get the joke. It's the approach that stops us taking it seriously.'

A great pity if a good shortlist of subtle stories is belied by the crass but influential words of the chairman, and their literary project sidelined.

The short story and the concept of the best

My take on the National Short Story Award, the current shortlist and the BBC short story cuts - on The View From Here Magazine.

Women Writers and the Short Story

Sarah Crown ponders the recent successes of female writers with the short story, and concludes:

Whatever the reason, their current success has the welcome effect of reminding us that great writing doesn't have to be set on the grand scale.

The BBC National Short Story Award

Yesterday afternoon I managed to catch up with the BBC National Short Short Award on the BBC website, where podcasts of four of the five selected stories remained. Kate Clanchy's winning story, The Not-Dead and the Saved was certainly very impressive and extremely moving, and I'm not surprised that it won both this and the V S Pritchett awards. It's interesting that the press-release story stresses the wonder of the winner being a poet with only the third short story she has written (the implication being that she is not practised at the form). It seems to me that that's no wonder at all: short stories, as I'm frequently saying, are closer to poetry than novels, and this short story bears all the hallmarks of that: a linguistic attention and the structural and verbal patterning at which Clanchy as a poet is supremely practised, and it is these elements which create the control of emotion and tone for which this story has been rightly praised, and make it so moving.

The other stories were prosey by comparison, I thought. Sara Maitland's Moss Witch was an interesting choice as runner-up: it's typical of Maitland's oevre - ecological and feminist with a good dollop of fairytale quality. The judging panel were of course female, which might explain this, though I do wonder if it was the ecological theme that did it. It felt a little forced, even clunky, at times, I thought, but was certainly a most interesting concept, and memorable as so much of Maitland's writing is. Lionel Shriver's Exchange Rates was competent, indeed extremely well-oiled, but pretty much a traditional New-Yorker type story, I thought, and Jane Rogers' Hitting Trees With Sticks betrayed her drama background by being a dramatic monologue narrated by a woman beginning to suffer senility - a difficult feat to pull off with psychological authenticity, as the authorial voice was more knowing than the narrative voice, and I have to say I wasn't absolutely sure it worked - or maybe I was just put off by Julia McKenzie's reading which rendered the narrator rather irritating.

Guest Article: Julian Gough on Short Stories and Winning the National Competition

For some reason which must be to do with the engaging and off-the-wall character which informs his writing, Julian Gough has decided to privilege the Fictionbitch and this blog by offering his funny yet acute take on winning the prize and on the short story in general, for posting below. Since my last post stirred up something of a row, still ongoing, in the comments section, about why short stories should be beleaguered, Julian's (previously written) piece is apposite and timely. Many many thanks, Julian, and all power to you, I say.

Here is the piece by Julian Gough:

Twelve hours after the announcement of the winner of the National Short Story Prize for 2007, I was still on the piss with A S Byatt. What a mind! I’d never met her before. I might never meet her again. Obviously I had to try. But she told me firmly that she is extremely married. So this might be shaky, due to heartache and champagne.

Some people worry that the short story, like the vole, is declining due to loss of habitat.

I am here with news of joy. It is going to be OK.

The modern short story is often to be found hiding in a novel, often an Irish novel. English novels tend to go for the one broad arc, like a cast iron bridge by Brunel, with some curlicue and filigree to give texture. The Irish novel tends to have a single structuring principle, which is used to give a different kind of unity to a thousand shards of story, mosaiced. The English novel is made of iron and is cast, the Irish novel is made of everything and is assembled. You see it in the many styles of Joyce’s Ulysses, the many sources and voices of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, the various islands and incidents of Swift’s Gullivers’s Travels.

A fugitive short story could hide comfortably in any great Irish novel. A character could just open his mouth in a pub, and the story could inhabit his mouth like a cave. I’ve hidden short stories in the mouths of characters, deep inside novels, myself.

No, no need to worry. The short story is merely hiding out in the novel until it is safe to come out. And soon it will be safe to come out. Because the internet is creating a vast new habitat that has not yet found its final shape, or final inhabitants. Cyberspace is ripe to be colonized by the small and nimble vole of the short story, who will change his form to suit the new terrain. But it will still be short, and still a story. It’s going to be alright.

Meanwhile the people creating the biggest problems for the short story are the short story writers. Especially the dead ones. Because Chekhov was so good, so revolutionary, contemporary short story writers think that they can be revolutionary by copying him. They copy him: and the revolution doesn’t happen and the audience wanders off. Because that’s not how you do it.

Chekhov didn’t have a television. He didn’t have broadband access to everything ever right here and right now always on and ever ready. Chekhov wouldn’t write Chekhovian short stories if he were alive today. He’d write something else.

If you are a writer, maybe you should stop showing us in meticulously observed and realistic detail the realistic things which we (after a century of Chekhov’s subtle influence) meticulously observe ourselves every day, and which tell us nothing new about the world or ourselves.

Go wild. Wilder. Rip it up and start again. You can’t make a mistake, because there aren’t any rules yet…

A suggestion. If you want to go forward, go much further back. Take a running jump at it. Don’t read Ian McEwan. He’s very good, but he is of no use to you. Kill the father, and embrace the grand father. Read Rabelais. Read Erasmus. Read Aristophanes. Read somebody I’ve never heard of, someone out of print for the past three hundred years, who has just been put up online by Project Gutenberg, or Google Book Search. And rip them off something rotten. Steal it, take the wheels off, rebuild the engine, see if it can be converted into a seaplane, collide it with Krazy Kat, or Swedish jazz, or Somali hip hop, or the stories your mother tells about working on the production line at a pea canning factory in Germany when she was nineteen.

The spark of art comes from banging things together.

There is a potential downside to making it new. The publishing industry might have problems recognizing its merits, and will definitely have problems marketing it and selling it through channels which are friendlier to industrial product in standard packaging (Pink and pale blue and lime green for chick lit, dark orange flames against black, with gold type, for SAS memoirs… just slot book into package.)

I spent seven years having a go at revolutionizing the novel. At the end of it I had no money, no publisher, and was homeless. But I had some bloody good art, and that has to be enough for you because it may well be all you will get.

I was lucky. Halfway through writing my novel Jude, I realized I needed to step outside it, and write a short story. I needed to see where Jude had come from, and why he had left on the quest of the novel. So I wrote “The Orphan and the Mob”. And I wrote it as well as I could. I wrote it insanely meticulously (draft after draft, polish after polish, building in layer after layer), considering how it was a short story and would never earn me any money. And then it won the National Short Story Prize. And I cried.


It is incredibly important for writers to be able to write at any length.
Some ideas are short, and some ideas are long, and we need to make sure that the good stuff gets to the reader intact, neither cropped nor stretched to fit the publishing industry. This prize is terrific because it brings short stories out of hiding and into the spotlight, brings them to big audiences, at a time when the publishing industry either can’t or won’t.

Whatever you want to write, write it the way you want to write it, write it whatever length it wants to be, and stick it up on the internet if nobody will publish it. Don’t kill it to fit it into an industrial box. Artistically, we live in a golden age of freedom, and that’s terrifying. Commercially, we live with market censorship of certain forms. It’s a pain, but it’s survivable. I’m running out of time, the deadline is here, the champagne is wearing off, so, last suggestions: try comedy instead of tragedy. Ditch realism for a bit, see what happens. Because reality isn’t realistic any more.

Call this reality? Call this realistic? On the piss with A S Byatt, in a place that doesn’t allow mobile phones. A writer born in London, back in London, with an Irish mobile phone stuffed down my left sock and a German mobile phone stuck down my right sock, both phones vibrating with congratulations from England and Ireland and America and Berlin. Vibrating with love from around the one world.

It’s hard, being a writer. It’s lonely. May you all have such a moment in your future. May there be enough love to go round.

Julian Gough

Yawning Over Short Stories?

Not that much talk about the short story, though. Admittedly I'm in a hurry this morning, but one newspaper report on the National Short Story Competition result , announced yesterday, is all I can find.

Coming Up Trumps

Congratulations to Julian Gough, perhaps the least well known of the shortlisters, for winning the National Short Story Competition. I heard his story, The Orphan and the Mob, on Radio 4, and it was indeed for me a true short story: something luminous and apparently miniature holding something huge and profound, texturally complex yet vivid, patterned and musical and rich with allusion and, above all, a close attention to language. And, in that these qualities were preserved, beautifully adapted for radio. A great winner, plenty of controversy to set people talking about the short story: maybe the competition has come up trumps after all.

I am privileged to pull up here Julian's comment on my posts on the subject, a fascinating description of his response to the radio adaptation process:

"I'm glad you liked my comments on the problems of pushing highly individual works of art down distribution channels designed to handle a standard product.

I have very recent experience of the process, having had my shortlisted story ("The Orphan and the Mob") cut to fit the BBC's thirty minute slot.

Not having read the small-print, I hadn't realised the BBC were going to cut my story until they'd already abridged it and recorded it. The deed was done with no input from me whatsoever. And as you say, when you take out bits of a short story, it isn't the same story any more. A story is about the arrangement of parts, about particular rhythms and resonances, and all of that is totally altered when bits are cut out.

In my case, they removed all the swearing and a lot of the biological detail. Jokes were shortened. (Three variations on a comic riff would be cut back to one, so there was no sense of a riff at all).

So what they broadcast wasn't my story. It was something else.

But... but... but... having been through the process... and having been furious at first... I have come round to another way of looking at it.

Because the finished broadcast was superb. It wasn't my story, but it was great radio. At my suggestion they had cast Conor Lovett, the finest Beckett actor of his generation, as the 18-year old Jude. The BBC had started by auditioning 18 and 20 year olds straight out of drama school. When I reacted with horror, and suggested Conor Lovett, they auditioned him and loved him and cast him. Trust me, the lack of ego required to do that, and the sensitivity to the writer's suggestions, would never occur in, say, the film industry.

And the abridgement was, in its way, terrific. It was sensitive to the rhythms of the piece, and when it changed them, as it did, it managed to find new rhythms that worked. Usually slightly faster, more staccato ones, because of the cuts, but that gave it an energy which a linear medium like radio needs.

They took out some of my favorite Irish swearing ("Ardcrony ballocks!") and all mentions of urethral sphincters (and the original had a lot of them), but I can understand that, at three thirty in the afternoon, if the BBC broadcast my story intact, it would probably not get its charter renewed. Do you really want the playgrounds of England to resound to cries of "Ardcrony ballocks!" I think not.

And much of the cutting made it work better for radio. You can't pretend a short story is best transferred intact to radio. It isn't. My story ended with a purely visual sequence, where Jude, as he leaves the burning orphanage, hears the scratched orphanage single clearly for the first time. We read his uncomprehending and phonetic version of the lyrics,

"Some...
Where...
Oh...
Werther...
Aon...
Bo..."

and we realise (but he does not) that it's "Somewhere over the rainbow..."

Well all that just cannot be done on the radio. The bilingual puns ("Aon bo" is the Irish for "One cow") and all the rest only exist as words on paper. They've got to go.

But this is radio: And what they replaced all the description with was simply this: the song itself, rising over Jude's final words (which are, unknown to Jude, from the Wizard of Oz, and from Yeats' "Leda and the Swan", and which work fine on the radio.)

And with Conor Lovett's truly extraordinary delivery, and Judy Garland's actual voice, I think the BBC created a moment that was better, more emotionally powerful, than my original. I really did feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and along my legs, no kidding.

And that is why, even though the BBC cut off my ballocks and removed my urethral sphincter, I think they should have their charter renewed. They can't win, trying to broadcast tough art in daytime slots. But they do as good a job as anyone could, and the alternative isn't a Nirvana of great art broadcast uncut to millions at lunchtime. It's no art broadcast at all.

A bit of me would like everyone, everywhere, to hear all of it, at all hours. But that's a child's wish. Everyone everywhere doesn't want to hear it, urethral sphincters and all.

And the original story still exists on the page for all of those who do.

And my mum rang me after the broadcast to tell me how much she'd enjoyed it. Which was a result."

Who's Afraid of the Big Short Story?

The BBC insists that it is not cancelling but postponing the broadcast of Hanif Kureishi's story Weddings and Beheadings (shortlisted for the National Short Story competition), and implies, interestingly, that its motives are not entirely political but also literary. On Radio 4's Today programme this morning, John Humphrys reports that one BBC concern is that if broadcast of the story were to take place during the current crisis (concerning BBC reporter Alan Johnston), this would affect the way 'the story would be perceived'.

But this of course begs all sorts of questions. For one, does the BBC - as some of us have long suspected - not consider that short stories should be perceived in any political light? Are short stories not meant to be political? Are they supposed to remain in some kind of cosy tea-and-buns English-heritage world of 'entertainment'? Kureishi, interviewed this morning by Humphrys, refuses to budge from his position, insisting that the move is censorship, stating that the BBC 'should be committed to relevant and contemporary work', and that one of his jobs as a writer is indeed to write about the contemporary world.

But what about the feelings of Johnston's family? asks Humphrys. And here we get to the nub of the matter. What about the feelings of Johnston's family when Humphrys introduces the item by reminding us that a little-known group has claimed to have killed him? What's the difference? Well, of course we know the difference: good fiction makes us live and feel the truth of our contemporary world in a way far beyond the scope of news bulletins. This is the power of fiction; it is the power of which the BBC and much of our media nowadays, committed to bland entertainment, seem afraid.

But I am delighted to find the short-listers in this competition kicking up against this media stranglehold, on the short story in particular. First Julian Gough, now this, and later on in today's programme, Jonathan Falla using the publicity afforded by the competition to draw attention to the dire status of the short story within British culture: a publisher to whom he sent his short-listed story (offering a collection) replied that he had not even scanned it, since short stories are so hard to sell (something Salt would not agree with).

On the surface of things, the radio commitment seems like a brake on the possibilities of this competition, but in the event it seems to be exposing some of the important questions about the short story in Britain today.

Piping Up on the Wireless

Yesterday I wrote about the literary restrictions BBC broadcast must inevitably place on the short stories in the National Short Story Competition, but today we witness the BBC imposing a restriction of a different, but maybe not unconnected, kind: political censorship, as Hanif Kureishi calls the cancellation of his short-listed story Weddings and Beheadings 'in the wake of the news that BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has been killed by a jihadist group'. Kureishi is implied to be furious, and is crying freedom of speech, as authors half-delight in doing on such occasions, knowing full well that if a piece of work is worth banning then it must have hit a true nerve and is probably pretty something.

And on this morning's BBC Today programme fellow short-lister Julian Gough, who made clear that his story too has profound political undercurrents, gave somewhat excited and rebellious voice to the idea that forcing literature into marketing time-slots is crazy: 'The art gets mangled going down that pipe.'

You can't hear Jackie Kay talking about her story yesterday, as the links on the BBC website seem in fact to have got mangled. Broadcast yesterday afternoon, it was the beautifully captured perspective of a Glaswegian man in despair and intent on committing suicide but slowly pulling himself together as he gets involved in the practicalities. For me, though, it was less subtle than many of her other stories, and you can just imagine that clever Jackie pitching it, with its single focus and repetitions, specifically for the parameters of radio.

National Short Story Competition

The shortlist for the National Short Story Competition was unveiled on Friday, and I'm wondering whether the fact that I can't find any news reports about it is yet more evidence of our national lack of interest in the short story, or of the fact that news editors, like me, find the competition an uninspiring creature. Last year, its first year, this competition attracted over 1,400 entries, but this year only 428 entered, presumably discouraged by the establishment status of last years' winners. Well, OK, nothing wrong with sorting the wheat from the chaff (ie ensuring the seriousness of entrants) and signalling from the start that this is to be a competition of status, but the suspicion arose then that there was a focus on a certain kind of status, and at the expense of innovation for which the short story can be a supreme vehicle.

It's hard to comment on something you went in for but failed at, without looking as if you're crying sour grapes, but (Bitch that I am) I'll go ahead anyway.

In fact there are names on this year's shortlist which are unfamiliar to me *, and clearly it is only by listening to the stories (all this week on Radio 4) that we'll be able to judge, but the fact that the shortlist consists of five men and one woman with a story about a man fails at this juncture to reassure that the establishment flavour has been dispelled. Jackie Kay, the one woman and the only writer on the list whose short stories I know well, is indeed a brilliant short-story writer: her stories are lucid, tight, vivid and utterly humane. And here's an important point: they work beautifully on radio.

For this is the unacknowledged requirement of any story submitted for this competition: it needs to work on radio, broadcast being part of the prize. Stories with a conversational voice like those of Jackie's work on radio, stories with strong characterisation (again like Jackie's) work on radio, as do monologues and stories without too much dialogue allowing a credible reading by an actor. There are stories which definitely don't work on radio: strongly non-linear stories, stories with typographical patterning, or any kind of innovation which can't be picked up easily by the ear. It is hard not to conclude that certain kinds of stories would be out of the running.

Here is one of the competition rules:

'By submitting a story Entrants agree that the BBC may in its sole discretion edit, adapt or abridge it for the sole purposes of broadcast.' (My italics)

Well, as far as I'm concerned anyone who can make a rule like that simply doesn't understand the nature of short stories - that the perfect short story is a web of connections, all of its parts perfectly orchestrated, that it has to be the length it is and not a scheduler's required minute count.

As last year, the judges' comments have betrayed a similarly reductive and slightly defensive approach to the short story. On Radio 4 Monica Ali spoke only of the range of subject-matter covered in the shortlist. On the BBC website chair Mark Lawson again stresses subject matter, stating that

this year's selection makes very clear that there is no connection at all between word-count and the scale of subject-matter or characterisation that can be achieved

and James Lasdun (also last year's winner), when asked what was the essential value of the short story(admittedly he was being rushed), reacted like a rabbit caught in the headlights and could only come up with 'Economy.'

* Edited in: As last year, every author on the short list is however a published novelist.