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Congratulations to Sarah Hall, who was named this week as the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2013. Her story, Mrs Fox, is an earthy fable about a complacent husband whose wife undergoes a shocking transformation.
Hall emerged as the winner of the £15,000 prize from an all-female shortlist (stories were submitted anonymously) that also included tales of quiet grief and vivid imagination from new and established authors Lisa Blower, Lavinia Greenlaw, Lionel Shriver and Lucy Wood. Settings for these stories range from the haunted corners of an old Cornish house to the panic-stricken streets of New York in Shriver’s Prepositions, which takes the form of a resentful letter looking back exactly 10 years earlier at the distinction made between the people who died on 9/11 but not in 9/11. All the shortlisted stories have been published in the annual anthology that is now available for those readers who, like Edgar Allan Poe, appreciate the power of a literary work that can be read in one sitting.
Sarah Hall is the author of the Booker Prize shortlisted The Electric Michelangelo, the eco-feminist science fiction novel The Carhullan Army and a short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference.
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