2015/2016 short story prize shortlist

28 January 2016

Here's the shortlist:

Jarred McGinnis - Daughters Of The Revolution

This is a fantastic list, and we're tremendously pleased - but for the fact that we could only put four stories on it... The truth is that we'd have been almost equally proud of a shortlist made up of any of the other stories from our original longlist. I don't know if it will be any compensation to the writers who didn't get through to this round to know how close they came to making the final cut... But I do hope they at least know they were all in serious contention and we thought their stories were excellent too. Speaking for myself, it was a subjective, personal process as much as it was a judgement of quality... But, of course, we had to make a choice somewhere, somehow. Here are the judges' thoughts on each of the four that made it through, in alphabetical order, by author surname:

Paul Ewen on You Must Forget

After first reading Jessica Greenman's story, You Must Forget, I wondered if its real author was actually David Bowie and if the work was in fact another elaborate piece in his final death riddle. You Must Forget is certainly very rich, dense and layered with meaning. 'Untethered' was a word used to describe it during the judging process, which I think is very apt. As a reader you are taken on a wonderful, rambling journey through a dreamy garden-like world, where flowers express fragility and human vulnerability, and darker themes, such as addiction and mental illness are suggested. It is a hugely imaginative work which demands much from the reader - it certainly required the most effort of all the shortlisted stories - but the rewards are equally great, and it stays with you like a recurring dream.

Sam Jordison on Feathered Friends

Feathered Friends is about loneliness, break-up, loss and a particular kind of quiet desperation. It's sad and it gnaws at you and it makes you feel very sorry for the world. But it's also bright and witty and - at times - hilarious. It's a fine mixture of light and dark and a lovely demonstration of talent and humanity.

Eloise Millar on Daughters Of The Revolution

What is ‘Daughters of the Revolution’ about? Well – on the surface, it’s a story involving two gloriously wayward teenagers (Paige, Annie) watching a film called ‘Pink Flamingos’ at Annie’s blind grandmother’s house:

“The only thing Paige knows about the movie is that at the end a fat trannie eats a dog turd. That is recommendation enough.”

These two sentences alone, coming at the end of the (short) first paragraph, were enough to make me sit up straight. Whoa there, I thought – and was transported immediately back to my own secondary school, where a similar film, ‘Animal Farm’, was passed around the entirety of Year 10.

But there’s much more going on here than scatological humour and the (pleasurable) shock of the obscene. This really is a terrific writer: the deceptive lightness of the prose, the whippet-quick pace, the giddy fun and the comedy, is all combined with other things – anxiety, isolation, unstated fear – to create a pitch-perfect expression of the teenage years: a halter-skelter, whirlwind affair, where, at any moment, you might lose your balance, and the fun will turn into something else.

Ben Myers on Backburn

In Backburn, Riona Judge McCormack writes like an author already well-established. The drama of an encroaching bush fire and the community that are pulled together to fight it is more than enough to sustain this pungent narrative. Hidden in the gaps is a suggested back-story too – one of traditions, relationships, hierarchies, race and tragedy. To me, it brought to mind several masters of the rural story – from William Faulkner through to Cormac McCarthy and J.M. Coetzee - and felt less like a novel compressed into a story and more a glimpse into a whole other world that I wanted to know a more about.

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Galley Beggar Press

2015/2016 short story prize shortlist

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