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Bridport Prize 2008 Judge
Short Stories
Helen Simpson
Helen Simpson was born in Bristol and grew up in London. She read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce, then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a freelance-writer, contributing articles to newspapers and magazines. Her latest collections of short stories are Constitutional ( 2005), and In the Driver's Seat (2007).
Helen Simpson was born in Bristol and grew up in London. She read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce, then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a freelance-writer, contributing articles to newspapers and magazines.
Her first collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (1990), won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and a Somerset Maugham Award and she was chosen as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' in 1993. There followed a second volume of short stories Dear George (1995). Her book, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), a collection of loosely linked stories about modern women and motherhood, won the Hawthornden Prize in 2001. She was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 2002 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She wrote the libretto for the jazz opera, Good Friday, 1663, screened on Channel 4 television, and the lyrics for Kate and Mike Westbrook's jazz suite Bar Utopia.
Helen Simpson lives in London. Her latest collections of short stories are Constitutional (2005), and In the Driver's Seat (2007).
"The short story form is intrinsically witty, adrenalised, quick--not restful. It encourages concision. VSPritchett described, 'How did the story change as I rewrote it, perhaps four or five times, boiling down a hundred pages into twenty or thirty, as I still do?
Story writing is exacting work.' I'll be looking for stories which show imaginative pleasure in meeting the demands of the form."
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |