BBC National Short Story Award

You can subscribe to Front Row on BBC Sounds, and you'll never miss a program, and you can always catch up.

You can, um, catch up, for instance, with, um, the National Short Story Award ceremony, um, which we broadcast from the Radio Theatre here at Broadcasting House on Tuesday.

Hello and welcome to this year's BBC National Short Story Award in conjunction with the University of Cambridge.

An annual celebration of the ability to capture in just a few hundred or a few thousand words what it takes some writers hundreds of pages to not quite pin down.

With us tonight in the radio theatre here at Broadcasting House, we have this year's shortlisted writers, the judges who had the task of reading their submissions and wrangling their way to a final winner, and relatives and supporters fairly anxious, I imagine, to get to that final page revelation of who's actually won.

Well, many congratulations again to Eloise Barrett, winner of this year's Young Writers Award for her story Bloodshed in Rafa.

You can listen to all of these stories on BBC Sounds, search for BBC Young Writers Award, and let's have a round of applause, too, for the other shortlisted writers.

APPLAUSE Now, we're turning to writers a little further on in their writing careers, those shortlisted for the 2026 BBC National Short Story Award in conjunction with the University of Cambridge.

And joining me, along with David Almond here, are two of this year's judges.

Both of them actually know what it's like to be sat down there in the front row waiting for the final announcement.

Thank you to all my guests and the audience here at the Lowry in Salford.

Next week on Front Row, Simon Russell-Beal on playing Liberace, stage designer Es Devlin on her new retrospective at the Design Museum, and we'll be announcing the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.

Until then, from the Contains Strong Language Festival, goodnight.

You started writing short stories.

In a minute, I'm going to be speaking to one of the finalists in the BBC National Short Story Awards.

Why was the short story your modus vivendi and what appealed to the form about the form to you?

Well, I did my doctorate on the American short story, so I felt kind of familiar with short stories.

Hermione Lee is here too to tell us about her new biography of the Booker-winning novelist Anita Bruckner, not to mention the challenge of recreating a life when the person who lived it did everything she could to keep it private.

We hear from another of this year's shortlisted writers for the BBC National Short Story Award.

And who gets the credit for a record summer at the cinema box office? Sony Pictures would tell you it was these guys.

So what about you? What about me? Well, do you have Mrs Spider-Man?

Ian McCulloch and his song The Light That Surrounds You from Echo and the Bunnymen's new album Apples for Isaac, which is available from Friday.

And they're going to be playing the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, London on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.

Finally tonight, all this week, we're talking to the finalists in this year's BBC National Short Story Award in conjunction with the University of Cambridge.

And tonight it's the turn of the Australian-born writer Cherise Saywell, who was also shortlisted for the prize in 2023.

After the warnings of apocalypse, Jack Thorne on the writers fight back against AI.

And the magic words, Julie Andrews, how watching The Sound of Music with her own daughter inspired our latest shortlisted author for the National Short Story Award.

But first, Juliette Binoche has for 40 years been a luminous presence on the big screen.

As an actress, she's won acclaim and multiple awards for over 60 films, including Three Colors Blue, Chocolat, and The English Patient, for which she won an Oscar and a BAFTA.

Um, we've been talking about AI and what needs to be done to regulate it, and his new version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is on at the Palace Theatre, London from October the ninth, written without AI.

[laughs]

Time now to meet the latest nominee for the BBC National Short Story Award with the University of Cambridge.

Lucy Caldwell previously won the prize in twenty twenty-one, has been shortlisted five times, and has also been a past judge.

More on that later.

We'll be announcing the finalists for this year's BBC National Short Story Award, too, and we'll hear from the first of this year's shortlisted writers.

We're gonna start tonight, though, with a different kind of narrative thread, the Bayeux Tapestry.

Embroidery, if you want to be picky, on show in England for the first time in nearly a thousand years.

Um, thank you both.

Um, Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang is out now, and, uh, you can hear her interviewed on Woman's Hour next week.

Now, it's time again for the BBC National Short Story Award with the University of Cambridge, and we have the shortlist for you.

Five writers who've already won six hundred pounds and a broadcast of their story on Radio 4, and now have to wait to see who will take the fifteen thousand pound award for the overall winner.