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Bridport Prize 2003
2003 Short Story Judge - Rose Tremain
The short story is a difficult and demanding form. It is perhaps as hard to write a really first-rate short story as it is to write a really first rate poem. Both need a strong informing idea. Both demand an economy of means. Both demand - line by line - a language appropriate to its subject, upon which the writer must never lose his/her grip.
Young writers often begin by writing short stories in the belief that, because they are short, they will be easy to accomplish. I began the same way. But it was only much later (and after many stories had, rightly, been rejected and I had progressed to the longer, more accommodating form of the novel) that I started to understand what the ingredients of a good short story might truly be.
Very few stories among the thousands submitted to the Bridport Prize had any poetic coherence. Very few had tight plotting. Very few sounded any original note and very few were either moving or funny. But it was a real delight to come across a band of talented writers whose work shows a real understanding of how the thing is done, and I am very happy with the list of winners.
The Crossing by Jonathan Haylett takes first prize. This is a beautifully plotted, impressively coherent story, set in Africa, about the fate of an old woman, once a level-crossing keeper, now made redundant and left to a bitter solitary life with her dog in a lonely house scorched by the winds. It's both a powerful drama, with a classic Mark Twain 'snapper' ending, but also a moving meditation on the world's indifference to those who have been left by the wayside on life's journey. It's told neatly and quietly, never striving for effect. It would make a very original and compelling short film.
The Bastard William Williams, the Writer Allen Jones by Alex Keegan wins second prize. This is a wry and amusingly told story (and in the voice of) an elderly Welshman visited by a young writer in search of his Welsh roots. Sceptical about the writer's motives and doubtful about his ability to understand the truth about the past, the old man takes the writer on a journey through the history of his town, once thriving around its coal mine and now left to dereliction. Gradually, the barriers of class and intellect which divide the two men begin to break down and the story moves towards a believable and quietly optimistic ending.
The Last Days of Johnny North by David Swann wins third prize. I particularly admired the original and playful voice in which this story is told. It charts the sorrows and eccentricities of a group of inhabitants of a windswept Northern town. Chief among them is Gran, who drives a pie van she's named the Gabriel Rachets, after the 'unseen creatures that screamed in the night'. The van has no brakes. Every day, Gran goes helter-skeltering over the hills and down the valleys, accompanied by her grandson, the narrator, Michael, who is splendidly fearless, inquisitive and wry. And the story is a clever meditation upon lives that are lived in a kind of wild free-fall and those that are static and anxious and closed.
Subjects among the Runners Up range from snapshots of Germany before and during the war, English family rituals observed by an American outsider; Friends with HIV staying miraculously alive and surviving their parents; thirty-something marriage angst; serial abortion; wife swapping; pet competitions; abusive fathers; the late loss of virginity and a loner going slowly mad in Regents Park.
All the stories selected have in common one essential quality; a sense that the writer knows what she/he is doing. Good writing is like a boat which doesn't leak, which has a sure hand at the helm. To get into such a boat and sail across so many stormy, luminous oceans has been one of the great pleasures of this summer of 2003.
 | The Bridport Prize is a fundraiser for Bridport Arts Centre, charity no 1069780 |