A likely story

We talk to the judges of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2013 about the shortlist on the morning of the winner announcement.

The winner is announced on 22 March 2013.

Andrew Holgate on 'The Gun' by Mark Haddon

Set in a crisply and precisely imagined 1970s, where two boys become enmeshed in a terrifying world after they take possession of a pistol, Mark Haddon's The Gun has some remarkable echoes with his earlier work, particularly The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which also features a young boy and a dead animal. Haddon doesn't put a foot wrong in this wonderfully atmospheric story. It has such grip, such narrative drive and such a sense of time and place and teenage anxiety, and you read from beginning to end totally absorbed by the increasingly fraught situation of the central character.

Andrew Holgate on 'The Dig' by Cynan Jones

Cynan Jones's 'The Dig' introduces readers to a secret and hidden world - of illegal hunting for badgers, and the shadowy men who do it. Jonese remains in complete control of his material throughout the story, and writes with great economy and dept, but what stays with you about the story is both the real, gritty, illicit immediacy of the hunt for a badger, and the immense and sympathetic imaginative skill with which he portrays the nervous young boy at the centre of it all.

Andrew O'Hagan on 'Miss Lora' by Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz's story 'Miss Lora' has the feel of a contemporary classic. Written in the energetic, high-toned Spanglish that is characteristic of his early short stories, the story caught the judges' attention with its precise, unflinching prose, and with its brilliant evocation of an immigrant world struggling with modernity. Diaz is a short story writer who gives everything its due -- no words are wasted and his characters harbour both a sense of dignity and a wealth of surprise. 'I, as a writer, find myself trying as best as I can,' Diaz once said, 'to describe not only the micro-culture that I grew up in, but some of what that leads to.' In 'Miss Lora' he offers a vivid world of light and darkness; it is not a comforting story but it earned its place on the shortlist with its payload of beauty and truth. It is a work that echos in the heart as well as the mind. Along with the other shortlisted entries, it embodies the health of the short story today.

Joanna Trollope on 'The Beholder' by Ali Smith

If I were teaching a lesson on how to write a short story, I should use Ali Smith's 'The Beholder' as a superb example. It takes a wonderfully mysterious idea - what happens to a mind that has suffered stupendous blows and stresses in a short space of time - and weaves a bizarre but not fantastical narrative round it that leaves the reader with a feast to ponder over and wonder at when the story is done.

The heroine - whose marriage has collapsed, whose father has died and who has lost her job - discovers that a vigorous rose bush is inexorably sprouting from her collarbone. Her doctor cannot comprehend it, she herself is strangely undisconcerted by it, especially when a gypsy woman tells her it is a licitness, thus something perfectly allowed and lawful.

But - what is it? Is it a metaphor? Is the heroine, calming describing this phenomenon, losing her mind? Or is she, in fact, finding it...We don't know. But we want to. Intriguingly this isn't a mad story but rather a very moving one. And it is really, really beautifully written.

Lionel Shriver on 'Call It "The Bug" Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title'by Toby Litt

Though 'post-modern' in style, 'Call it "The Bug"...' generates the real emotional content that formal self-consciousness usually kills.  The narrator is trying to bash out a sci-fi story at the same time as his mother is dying of cancer. The sci-fi content, which supposes a much-coveted mechanical "bug" that protects people from nearly all disease, despite which an old woman is finally dying anyway, interacts painfully with the here-and-now, in which no such prophylactic device has rescued the narrator's mother. What makes the story work is the author's huge impatience with the artifices of fiction, the exertion of creativity, and the impotence of imagination, as he is anxious to be gone and see his mother, perhaps for one of the last times. Thus the real subject of the story becomes the frustration, disappointment, even stupidity of writing fiction in the face of real life and real death. Most experienced writers will recognize the irritation at having to adhere to tired fictional conventions at the best of times-like inserting one more scene to establish a character is 'sympathetic'-and Toby Litt captures that irritation writ large when tragedy on the other side of the computer screen strikes.

Sarah Waters on 'Evie' by Sarah Hall

On one level, the premise of Hall's story is a familiar one: Alex and Evie, husband and wife, have their tired relationship reinvigorated by Evie's new and startling appetite for sexual experimentation with a masochistic edge. Surrendering themselves to erotic excess, the couple are drawn deeper and deeper into a world of physical and emotional risk. So far, so Fifty Shades - but then comes an unexpected denouement, which turns this scenario completely on its head. Suddenly 'Evie' is not another demonstration of women's complicity with a certain kind of pornified female sexuality; it's about the dangers, for women and for men, of pornification itself. What Hall offers us, in fact, is a parable of the violence done to intimate relationships by our increasingly over-sexualised culture. As such, 'Evie' is a deeply disturbing read, at once seductive and challenging - challenging, in part, precisely because it's so seductive. It's a story with important things to say; an extremely timely story. And Hall's style - which is often as risky as her subject-matter, putting prose under continual quiet stress - helps 'Evie' achieve a tremendous power and resonance. I've read the story many times now, and it still impresses and unnerves me.