BBC National Short Story Award 2013

Mariella Frostrup is a journalist, television presenter and arts critic. She currently presents The Book Show for Sky Arts and Open Book for BBC Radio 4. Recent projects include Leonardo Live for Sky Arts; The Young Ones for BBC1; Bringing Up Britain for Radio 4 and Blonde on Blonde for Radio 2. She is the film critic for Harper's Bazaar and is a columnist for The Observer Magazine, for whom she also writes major interviews. Mariella has previously sat on the judging panel for various arts awards including the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Evening Standard Film Awards, the Turner Prize, the Amnesty International Media Awards, the London Film festival and the RIBA Stirling Prize Awards. She currently sits on the Royal Academy Council.

Peter Hobbs is a novelist and short story writer. His debut novel The Short Day Dying (Faber, 2005) won a Betty Trask Prize, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His first collection of stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train (Faber, 2006), was nominated for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. His stories have been published in numerous anthologies and journals, and have been commissioned for broadcast on Radio 4. He is also the author of a very short novel, In The Orchard, The Swallows (Faber, 2012). As well as being a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation, he has taught courses at a range of events and literary festivals. Since 2008 he has been a writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.

Di Speirs worked in theatre and for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation before joining the BBC in 1991 as a Woman's Hour producer. She edited the Woman's Hour serial for three years and produced the first ever Book of the Week. She is now Editor of the BBC London Readings Unit, responsible for around a third of the output in Book of the Week, a quarter of Book at Bedtime, as well as Afternoon Stories, Radio 3 readings and Woman's Hour dramas and Afternoon Plays adapted from novels and short stories. She has been instrumental in the BBC National Short Story Award since its inception seven years ago and is a regular judge on the panel. She was also a judge of the 2008 Asham Award and Chair of the Orange Award for New Writing 2010.