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The BBC National Short Story Award 2010

David Constantine

The BBC National Short Story Award 2010
Categories: 21st Century, Anthologies, BAME, British, Women
Imprint: Comma Press
Publisher: Comma Press
Available as:
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Featuring
    Sarah Hall, Helen Oyeyemi, Aminatta Forna, Jon McGregor & David Constantine (winner)


    The BBC National Short story Award is one of the world's largest awards for a single short story. All five shortlisted stories, including the winner, are published here side by side. The Award is designed to honour Britain's finest short story writers and to re-establish the importance of the short story as a central literary form.

    This year's shortlist brings together a high calibre group of new and established authors exploring human relationships at their most dysfunctional and yet sustaining. Splintered families, the persistence of love, the public versus the private, and the plight of the outsider all provide a recurring focus for the authors in the running for the prize, which marks its fifth year in 2010. The panel of judges this year includes the author and Guardian journalist Kamila Shamsie, author and poet Owen Sheers, author Shena MacKay, BBC Editor of Readings, Di Speirs and the Today Programme's James Naughtie, who also introduces the collection.


    David Constantine is a novelist, poet and translator of Hoelderlin, Goethe, Faust and Brecht. He is also an editor of Oxford Poets, an imprint of Carcanet Press, and of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation . Born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1944, he is a Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, ... read more
    Awards won by David Constantine Short-listed, 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (The Shieling) Winner, 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize
    (Tea at the Midland)
    Winner, 2010 BBC National Short Story Award
    (Tea at the Midland)
    Praise for David Constantine 'I started reading these stories quietly, and then became obsessed, read them all fast, and started re-reading them again and again. They are gripping tales, but what is startling is the quality of the writing. Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be. Reading them is a series of short shocks of (agreeably envious) pleasure...'
    AS Byatt, Book of the Week, The Guardian
    'Flawless and unsettling.'
    Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year 2005, The Independent
    'Touched at times with humour and infused with compassion, these complex, nuanced stories speak repeatedly of lives lived in some form of exile, yet manage to keep in play the possibility that exile is not, contrary to appearances, our true condition.'
    New Welsh Review
    'A. S. Byatt has described reading a previous collection of Constantine's short fiction as akin to experiencing ''a series of short shocks of (agreeably envious) pleasure''. Tea at the Midland shows the author to be on equally sparkling form again.'
    The TLS
    'The excellence of the collection is fractal: the whole book is excellent, and every story is excellent, and every paragraph is excellent, and every sentence is excellent. And, unlike some literary fiction, it's effortless to read.'
    The Independent on Sunday
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