Abiola Oni was shocked when she won last year’s Guardian and 4th Estate BAME short story competition for her wondrous story “75”. She had submitted her entry close to deadline and felt this would affect her chances. “But I was confident in what I had to say,” she says. “I was confident that only I could say it. I was confident that I’d made my story the best it could ever be. Many amazing things have happened since I won the prize but it all started with the confidence that it could be me.”
Open to black, Asian and minority ethnic writers, the BAME short story prize is just one of several new attempts across the UK publishing industry to address its diversity problem. As Oni’s story highlights, it is not a shortage of talent and confidence among the UK’s BAME writers that is preventing their work from making it to our bookshelves.
Now in its second year, the BAME short story prize opens for entries today from UK and Ireland residents who are 18 or over. My fellow judges – author Niven Govinden, Elle UK literary editor and talent scout Sharmaine Lovegrove, 4th Estate commissioning editor Anna Kelly and Emma Paterson, literary agent at Rogers, Coleridge & White – and I are looking for fresh, compelling and original stories of no more than 6,000 words, to be submitted by 2 April.
A shortlist of six will be announced on 5 June, with a winner picked on 13 July. The winner will receive £1,000, a one-day workshop with 4th Estate’s editorial, publicity and marketing teams, and their story will be published on the Guardian website.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter, George Saunders’s Tenth of December, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Cell One, Junot Díaz’s The Cheater’s Guide to Love: the best short stories are little sucker punches to the soul and can contain all the weight and fury of a 900-page behemoth. As a judge, I am very pleased to be involved – and as a reader and lover of short stories, I am selfishly excited to read what is submitted. Send your stories to www.4thEstate.co.uk/PRIZE
