Our favourite short story writers

The winner of the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 is announced tonight, live on BBC Radio 4's Front Row. We all like books. We like suggestions of books to read. There's nothing more exhilerating than having a list of books that inspired other writers. Especially when it comes to the short story writers. I asked our shortlisted authors to tell me who their favourite short story writers were. Some I had already read, some I knew of by reputation, others... I added to my 'Must Read' list.

I imagine you'll feel the same too.

Adam T Ross:

I just blurbed Alix Ohlin's new collection Signs and Wonders - a terrific book. She's a writer of startling emotional intelligence and great plotting. Jim Shepard's work indicates just how pliant and wide-ranging the form can be, since he tells of everything from Yeti hunts to Chernobyl's effects on the lives of three brothers to the emotional limitations of Black Ops agents, and I'm just amazed by his powers of world-creation. George Saunders is so damn funny. Alice Munro because she's our age's Chekhov. And then there are so many other great writers out there: Karen Russell, Alan Heathcock, David Means, Matthew Klam, Sam Lipsyte, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Nathan Englander. I could go on and on...

Carrie Tiffany:

John McGahern, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Sherman Alexie, Alice Munro and the wonderful Australian writer, Gillian Mears. The Americans and the Irish are the masters. I admire a simple oratorical style, an ease with language, a confidence. Very fine short stories don't have to 'reach,' they reveal the story to the reader as if it has always been known.

Chris Womersley:

That depends on what day it is, what mood I'm in, so I'll give you a whole bunch of them. I still love and re-read John Cheever. I particularly admire the way Cheever finishes his stories on a sort of updraft. Denis Johnson's collection Jesus' Son is another one I re-read every so often. I also like Junot Diaz and Josephine Rowe. Cate Kennedy is a terrific short story writer. Richard Yates. Franz Kafka, of course. JG Ballard for his disquieting landscapes. More recently, I admired Sarah Hall's collection Beautiful Indifference, the language of which is tuned to an almost unbearable pitch.

Deborah Levy:

J G Ballard's story collection, The Day of Forever,  was a revelation. It still thrills me decades after I first  read it. Chinua Achebe's collection of short fiction, Girls at War is  a masterclass for anyone interested in luminous and subtle writing that patiently shows us how desire, ambition  and optimism is crushed by war and poverty. The first line in his story, 'The Madman', establishes a way of seeing the world in 8 words. 'He was drawn to markets and straight roads'. Then there is the little known work of Gisele Prassinos, (born in Istanbul in 1920 to a Greek family) who was much admired by Andre Breton and the Surrealists. Here is one of my favorite first lines  from her story 'Venda and the Parasite' - 'When Venda was born, her father laid a glowworm in her blonde hair'.

Henrietta Rose Innes:

Writers whose stories have made a big impression on me at different times include Flannery O'Connor, JG Ballard, Joyce Carol Oates, Kafka, Salinger, Nabokov... Of more recent publications, I have very much liked Wells Tower's work, and certain stories by David Foster Wallace. Among South African writers, Ivan Vladislavic's stories are particularly influential, and he's also written a wonderful book about unwritten short stories - The Loss Library. Published in South Africa, Diane Awerbuck, David Medalie and Mary Watson have all produced vivid, original collections that have inspired me. From further north, I have been struck by powerful stories by Uwem Akpan and NoViolet Bulawayo. 

Julian Gough:

I know I'm supposed to mention a bunch of award winning, contemporary, literary writers here, but nothing you read as an adult has the impact of the short stories you read as a kid. And what I read was science fiction. The prose was sometimes pretty basic; but the ideas were terrific. These were my people, with my obsessions; Frederik Pohl, Philip K Dick, J G Ballard, Ursula K Le Guin, John Sladek, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas M. Disch, Stanislaw Lem (the wonderful Polish SF writer who wrote Solaris), Brian Aldiss, James Tiptree Jr. (real name Alice B Sheldon), Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison (the Norman Mailer of SF).

But you can't read them, now, the way I read them, then… The problem with writing about the future is that the real future eventually arrives, and it messes up your story. All those glorious, distant futures, with computers still rare, expensive, and the size of a room, and the journalist hero smoking a cigarette, as the Pan-Am rocket lands beside the World Trade Centre. He gets off the rocket, finds a payphone, and asks the operator to put through a long distance call to the News of the World - the Martians are about to attack the Soviet Union…

Krys Lee:

I'm constantly astonished by how many good writers there are, but I particularly enjoy stories by William Trevor, Anton Chekov, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and John Cheever.

Lucy Caldwell:

The greats, of course - Alice Munro and Katherine Mansfield and William Trevor, John McGahern and Joyce and Chekhov, Borges and Barthelme and Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Oscar Wilde, Poe. I also love Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore, Tim Winton and Alistair MacLeod, Dambudzo Marechera, Tobias Wolff, David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Janet Frame, Mavis Gallant, Claire Keegan, Kevin Barry, Karen Russell, Yiyun Li. One of my favourite writers is Junot Diaz, and I can't wait for his new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, which comes out this autumn. I'm just about to start Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which I've been looking forward to, and Stuart Evers's collection from last year, Ten Stories About Smoking, is on my bedside pile too.

Miroslav Penkov:

There are so many writers whom I admire, both living and dead. I love Chekhov, but who doesn't? The long stories of Tolstoy. Hemingway and Carver - when I first read their stories in English my mind caught on fire. I love the stories of Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, Yasunari Kawabata and Milorad Pavic. From the Bulgarian writers I adore Elin Pelin, Yordan Yovkov; but it is Nikolay Haytov's Wild Tales that are closest to my heart.

And there are so many wonderful writers working in the short story form nowadays. Too many to list really. But of those, my favorite is William Trevor. His stories move me so deeply I've embarrassed myself on at least two occasion, both times teaching The Ballroom of Romance with tears in my eyes.

M J Hyland:

Richard Ford, Richard Bausch, Flannery O'Connor, Tobias Wolff & Joyce Carol Oates.

At their best, these writers tell a great story, and they tell it without authorial interference, or the kind of needless showing-off that breaks frame, dilutes the fictional dream. There's a truthfulness in the best work by these authors, an overarching sense that the characters will be made real, and they will meet with real trouble, pain, conflict, and react in credible and compelling ways.

These are smart writers. They have the vital pairing; a fierce story-telling instinct and the right kind of word-doctoring canny. They know how to judge what belongs, what doesn't belong on the page; they weigh it up, find the perfect proportions for a story. They know how much should be said, or left unsaid, and they work towards a careful and calculated effect. I do more than read words on the page when I read these authors: I see what happens to the story's people, and in seeing, I believe the happenings, the 'aboutness' to be true. And sooner or later, belief is what gives rise to the biggest reward: I have been somewhere else. I have gone from myself.