Doncaster-born writer Colwill Brown has won this year's BBC National Short Story Award for a 'heartbreaking' entry about shame and the long-term effects of trauma, told in South Yorkshire dialect. The £15,000 prize, run in collaboration with Cambridge University, was announced at a ceremony at BBC Broadcasting House on Tuesday evening.
Brown's story, 'You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle', follows a teenage girl whose life is changed after a brutal incident with two boys. Inspired by her upbringing in Doncaster in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the story was described by judging panel chair Di Speirs as 'alive and immediately compelling, deeply disturbing, a story we couldn't forget'. Speirs added: 'The brio of the dialect, the brilliance of both the second person narration and the handling of the passage of time, and above all the exploration of a life critically damaged in a moment, all made this our unanimous winner.'
Brown's debut novel, 'We Pretty Pieces of Flesh', was published earlier this year. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Catherine Taylor wrote that the novel 'manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original', adding that 'you will probably read nothing else like it this year'.
Also shortlisted for the award were Caoilinn Hughes, Edward Hogan, Emily Abdeni-Holman and Andrew Miller, whose novel 'The Land in Winter' is on the shortlist for this year's Booker Prize. Each shortlisted author receives £600, and their stories appear in an anthology published by Comma Press, available on BBC Sounds.
Bonnie Lander Johnson, fellow in English at Cambridge University, said: 'Brown's Yorkshire-dialect story is a fast, taut examination of repercussions. One messy, half-remembered night in a young woman's life echoes down the years in bouts of rage and shame.' The winner of the young writer's award, open to 14- to 18-year-olds, was also announced: Rebecca Smith, a 17-year-old from Sheffield, won for 'Scouse's Run', a story set in Yorkshire and written in dialect.
