D W Wilson: Youngest Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award

D W Wilson was this week announced the youngest ever winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2011 for his story 'The Dead Roads'.

The story is a classic North American road trip story with a difference. Three already seems like company as two old school buddies try to win the affections of a free-spirited girl; when a mysterious man enters the picture, things become even tenser.

We spoke to the 26-year-old Canadian the day after his win to get the skinny on this young hot talent.

> Congratulations on the win - how does it feel?

Right now, as I write this, it feels like a pretty enormous hangover (Jon McGregor is partially to blame). But afterward it'll take a while to actually sink in, and then I'll wander around dazed until someone like my editor or agent or girlfriend orders me back to work.

> You are the youngest person to win the Award. How does it feel to be in the company of Julian Gough, Claire Wigfall et al at this early stage of your writing career?

Pretty unbelievable, to be honest. I think it was a year and a half ago that I was at UEA listening to Jon McGregor banter with Andrew O'Hagan at a reading there - it'd never have crossed my mind that I'd be mentioned in the same breath as him eighteen months later. It's a big honour, and a lot of people have put in a lot of time to help me get where I am, so I hope I can live up to the expectation.     

> This story itself is a departure from the rest of your collection. What was it about the landscape in the story that inspired you to write it?

I wouldn't say the landscape inspired the writing of the story, but was instead something I filled in afterward that I hoped would add to the suspense and unease that permeates the roadtrip. This is always the case with my fiction, though: I write voice-first, 'listening' (for lack of a better word) to the sentences as they come. Also, both the landscape and the town the characters find themselves in is fictional - though I once did encounter an amusement park-turned-gas-station somewhere off the I5 in California.

> Who, in your opinion, is a master of the form?

Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Bill Gaston.

> What can we expect from you and when? We're all anxious to read more.

My short story collection, Once You Break a Knuckle, came out earlier this month (in Canada) - 'The Dead Roads' is one of the stories. The collection is linked together by place, and some of the characters reappear in different capacities throughout; I think Duncan shows up in two others, Vic mentioned in one. My first novel, Ballistics, is nearly finished and tentatively slated for next fall - it's about a young man trying to rescue his estranged father from a wild fire. I don't have a UK deal, though, so you'll have to order the books online!

> What is the greatest thing you've learned about your writing, and the writing of others, from your UEA course?

Probably how best to bleed money from the UK and Canadian governments! I kid. I don't know that there's any one thing I came out with that I didn't have going in (I did five years of writing workshops during my undergraduate degree, learned all the ropes there), but there's a difference of quality, or maybe even confidence, that I got from UEA. Perhaps it was the feeling of being a writer and not a student of writing - that's something UEA did, took it seriously, made you take it seriously. Total immersion in a community that cares about the craft as much as you do is not something to undervalue, either - but these are all ineffable. It's taught more like a tradesman's apprenticeship than standard lecturing, and the improvement is gradual, but still noticeable. Tough question. I suppose I realised that you don't have to write about exotic and fantastical places for your writing to be exotic and fantastic - that's a lesson that took a while to sink in. There are three or four novels from my graduating class now picked up by publishers, and they're all set where the writers grew up - Manchester, Kent, the Midlands. You write what you know.

> What do you plan to do with the award money?

I'm saving for a house (aren't we all). I'll probably have to buy something for my girlfriend - you know how it is. Apparently I've been unanimously nominated to buy my friends drinks too, as congratulations(?). I haven't quite figured out how that works.

> What are you currently reading?

Half Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan, one of the Booker shortlistees (and Giller longlistees - jealous). She taught on and off at the University of Victoria, where I did my undergrad.  I also just finished In the Winter Dark, by Tim Winton, which was odd.

> Where do you tend to write?

Generally, as cliche as it is, in coffee shops. I can't work at home - something to do with the separation of my personal and professional lives. For a while I had a shed in my backyard in Norwich, complete with rickety walls, overgrown vegetation, bugs, and the stink of gasoline, but I sadly have to move out of that house and couldn't take the shed with me. If anyone has a spare shed...

> Recommend to our readers the one book we should read before we 'find ourselves on the Dead Roads'

Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, which is a tour de force and my favourite novel.