Petina Gappah is one of the judges for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2018. This prize is the richest prize in the world for a short story.
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is a British literary award for a single short story open to any novelist or short story writer from around the world who is published in the UK or Ireland. The winner receives £30,000, and the five shortlisted writers each receive £1,000. Previous winners of the award are C.K. Stead, Anthony Doerr, Adam Johnson, Junot Diaz, Kevin Barry, Bret Anthony Johnston, Jonathan Tel, and Yiyun Li.
The judging panel for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2018 will comprise former journalist and best-selling author Sebastian Faulks; award winning novelist and short story writer Petina Gappah; acclaimed author and short story writer Tessa Hadley and broadcast journalist and author Mark Lawson. Andrew Holgate, Literary Editor of The Sunday Times, completes the line-up. The award is worth £30,000 to the winning writer.
An international lawyer and writer from Zimbabwe, Petina Gappah is the author of two critically acclaimed short story collections, An Elegy for Easterly and Rotten Row, and a novel, The Book of Memory, winner of The McKitterick Prize. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, A Public Space and other journals, and have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
The judges are looking for an outstanding English-language story of 6,000 words or under from a fiction author from anywhere in the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland. The winner will receive £30,000, and the five shortlisted writers will each receive £1,000. The deadline for entries this year is 6pm on 28 September 2017. A longlist will be announced in February 2018, followed by a shortlist of six in March 2018. The winner will be announced at a gala dinner in London on Thursday 26th April 2018.
Speaking about the award, Petina Gappah commented, “It’s a huge honour for me to be asked to judge the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. I am, above all, a short story writer, and I know many brilliant writers for whom this is a natural medium, but who do not get nearly the same attention they would if they wrote novels. So, it is truly gratifying to see this amount of attention, not to mention money, being given to the form. I look forward to judging this year, and to participating in wider conversations about how to give short stories the higher profile they deserve in the UK and beyond.”
