The BBC National Short Story Award 2010 - Couverture souple

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She received a BA from Aberystwyth University, Wales, and a MLitt in Creative Writing from St Andrews, Scotland . She is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize. In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was short-listed for the Man Booker prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the Prix Femina Etranger, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007, and won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, and was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Her fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry and is an award-winning translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. His three previous short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine's latest collection Tea at the Midland has been short-listed for the 2013 Frank O Connor Prize and was selected for the Books of the Year 2012 list by the TLS and the London Evening Standard. Aminatta Forna s The Memory of Love (2010) was selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and The Times. Her previous novel Ancestor Stones was a New York Times Editor's Choice book, selected by the Washington Post as one of the Best Novels of 2006, won the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and was nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. The Devil that Danced on the Water was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003, serialised on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper. Jon McGregor won the Somerset Maugham Award and has twice been long listed for the Man Booker Prize. He has also written for The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, The New York Times and Granta magazine. Helen Oyeyemi is the author of three novels, The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House and White is For Witching, and a short story collection, Mr Fox.

The BBC National Short story Award is one of the world's largest awards for a single short story. All five shortlisted stories, including the winner, are published here side by side. The Award is designed to honour Britain's finest short story writers and to re-establish the importance of the short story as a central literary form. This year's shortlist brings together a high calibre group of new and established authors exploring human relationships at their most dysfunctional and yet sustaining. Splintered families, the persistence of love, the public versus the private, and the plight of the outsider all provide a recurring focus for the authors in the running for the prize, which marks its fifth year in 2010. The panel of judges this year includes the author and Guardian journalist Kamila Shamsie, author and poet Owen Sheers, author Shena MacKay, BBC Editor of Readingsm Di Speirs and the Today Programme's James Naughtie, who also introduces the collection.