BBC National Short Story Award 2008

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages; it was read on BBC Radio's Book at Bedtime and won the Orange Award for New Writers. Penguin published her second novel, The Lessons in April 2010. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. She has published prize-winning short fiction in Prospect, Woman and Home, the Sunday Express and a number of anthologies and in 2009 was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City. In 2008 she wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin's online We Tell Stories project, and her most recent online work is The Winter House. She broadcasts regularly, and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian.

Alexander Linklater is a freelance writer and associate editor of Prospect magazine as well as one of the award’s founders.

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.