The winners of the National Short Story Award and the Young Writers Award were announced on Radio 4’s Front Row programme on 6th October. Sarah Hall won the NSSA for the second time with her story ‘The Grotesque’, while Lottie Mills – currently a second year undergraduate in English at Cambridge – won the Young Writers Award with her story ‘The Changeling’.  As part of the prize for the YWA, the shortlisted writers were offered an online ‘experience day’, including a close-reading exercise on Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’, run by Lisa Mullen.

They examined the manuscript of Woolf’s text, which has been digitised by the Fitzwilliam Museum, and discussed Woolf’s writing process and what her revisions and deletions might tell us about how she was thinking. The young writers also discussed the impact of various technologies on their own creative work and how they used hand-writing, and in one case a manual typewriter, as part of their process.

Further details of the awards https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/bbcshortstory/category/nssa/