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Bridport Prize 2001
Short Story Judge - Kate Atkinson
One thing I feel fairly certain about - all judging is
arbitrary and personal. A different judge would undoubtedly have
chosen a different winning story. In a trawl of entries which
displayed a gratifyingly high standard, there was not in the end
not much to choose between the top five stories (which is a great
shame for those writers I ranked in my 'fourth and fifth places).
I imagine that someone with a dissimilar taste to mine could
quite possibly have reversed the order or even chosen an entirely
different story as the winner. So it goes.
There is a great deal written (much of it by story writers
themselves) about the art and the form of the short story.
Whereas most people feel no great need to define what a novel is,
the story seems to exercise a peculiar fascination - both what is
and what it is not - as if the story should fulfil a more
particular purpose than the novel. We may debate the 'future' of
the novel, the state of novel-writing, 'chick-lit', Brit-lit and
heaven knows what else, but we all seem to know what a novel
is.
One thing that everyone seems to agree on, however, is that
the story should not be viewed as a literary apprentice-work and
that to regard it as such is to devalue its literary merits -
stories command little enough respect from publishers and
booksellers as it is (they 'don't sell' we are forever being
told)without them being regarded as amateurish, in practice form.
But how else do we practise? How else does the would-be writer
learn (apart from trying to read everything that has ever been
written since time began, of course) if not by writing in a short
form?Imagine how many more turgid novels (and there are enough
already, surely?) would be wafting around the ether if it was the
first text that everyone turned their hand to.
With the story we can experiment with form and structure and
language, we can learn craft and technique, we can purge all that
autobiographical baggage which - no matter how interesting to
ourselves - is of no interest to anyone else (and trust me, it
really isn't). And we can do the most important thing of all,
which is to find our voice. Anyone can write, simply by virtue of
the fact that anyone can wield a pen and do joined up writing -
this I'm sure is why more people are would-be writers than
would-be sculptors and would-be musicians. Not enough people who
want to be writers understand that a text is as much an extract -
a work of constructed art - as is a Van Gogh's Sunflowers
or Mozart's Requiem.
Writing stories is an activity which fits into life as we live
it, a life which may include job and children and precious little
time. A story is so short that it can be laid out on a floor or a
table and viewed in its entirety, a story is manageable. And to
say that it is not to devalue the story as form nor to denigrate
the best story writers. It is the story that some of the most
interesting and innovative literary work is to be found - think
of James' huge canon of stories (and there was a man obsessed
with the form!) or of Hemingway's In our time one of the
great seminal literary works of this century. think of Chekov or
Katherine Mansfield or the under-rated stories of F Scott
Fitzgerald, or nearer to our own time the work of Borges, Robert
Coover, Donald Barthelme, or our contemporaries Ali Smith, Michel
Faber, Helen Simpson.
I have studied and written stories for the last twenty-five
years but I would hesitate to define what makes 'a good story'.
Certainly we want form and structure of some kind, we want to
hear a confident individual voice, but what is that gives us that
sense of satisfaction on reading something good? That elusive
something that sends us away knowing our lives have been improved
in some small, indefinable way. I don't know. What I do know is
that, like all novels, I believe that every good story is a
journey, a journey at the end of which both the reader and the
writer gain the satisfaction of having been taken somewhere.
Somewhere else.
And so to the judging. In the end my choice came down to good
writing, to a text well done, a tale well told. Stories which
were clever for the sake of being clever didn't cut much ice with
me, nor did angst-ridden introversion or stories about couples
breaking up. What I was looking for was that after two or three
readings a story would still seem fresh to me and that the memory
of it would linger on, long after I had finished reading.
There were some stories which were almost there but not quite
- Baby, for example, a nightmarish story about a baby that
never stops growing, orThirty Dollars a moving story
centred on unearthing an ancient child's body during the course
of an archaeological dig. My ten runners-up displayed, I hope a
fairly representative cross-section of work, all of them, I
think, were individual voices - some very memorable indeed - the
mentally-handicapped boy of The White Cadillac, the abused
and misused Japanese wife in Designa Garu the funny,
charming Wish List and the haunting Girl from
Gobabis.
Blood and Diamonds was high on my list - a powerful,
complex story set in Sierra Leone. Why didn't that make the top
three when 'quieter', perhaps less ambitious stories did? I felt
there was a novel in that story struggling to get out and there
was something about the structure that made the story more
intangible than was perhaps good for it. Breathing the
Waves a lovely story that wasn't quite coherent enough. And
Parting Shot a beautifully crafted rural story that
encompasses an entire miserable day from dawn to nightfall and
The Pass, a fearful story about fear in Northern Ireland -
all of these four writers I believe have the talent to become
published writers.
And so to the top three. I have to say that right up to the
end I found it hard to settle on the ranking order of these but
in the end I had to make decisions. In third place Ride -
a story I loved for its freshness and energy, the tale of a
dynamic coach ride from London to Scotland that ends in optimism
and the real beginning of a life. Second - and hard to ignore
-A Swan named Love, an extraordinary 'avio-erotic' tale of
a Leda and her Zeus - perhaps of all the stories the one that
remains most vivid in my mind.
I almost surprised myself with the winner, not really 'my kind
of story' at all and yet the one I kept coming back to. The
Runner is a quiet, understated story of a middle-aged man.
Like Ride it too is a journey that is both real and
metaphorical, unlike Ride the end is sad rather than
hopeful, yet this story is also funny, and tender, and ironic and
crafted - bursting with great images and wonderful
turns-of-phrase. At the end of the day it's a simple thing, it's
a well-written story. Who can ask for anything more?
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |