Adam Nicolson longlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award

We are thrilled to announce that Adam Nicolson has been longlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award with his story THE FEARFUL SUMMER.

The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award is the richest prize for a single short story in the English language, worth £30,000 to the winner. The award, for a story of 6,000 words or less, is open to any novelist or short story writer from around the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland.

Co-founded in 2010 by Lord Matthew Evans of EFG Private Bank and The Sunday Times’s Cathy Galvin, the award is now sponsored in its 11th year by Audible, the spoken word publisher.

Winners and shortlistees of the prize, which is international in reach and rewards stories of outstanding literary merit, have included some of the world's great writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winners Junot Díaz, Anthony Doerr and Adam Johnson, and Kevin Barry, Emma Donoghue, Mark Haddon, Sarah Hall, Bret Anthony Johnston, Yiyun Li, Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith, CK Stead, Elizabeth Strout, Jonathan Tel, David Vann and Gerard Woodward.

The prize also prides itself - through the blind reading undertaken by its judges - on discovering and promoting new and emerging writers. 2020's winner was the Irish writer Niamh Campbell.

1,256 writers entered the award in 2020, with stories coming from 48 different countries and every continent except Antarctica. Entries must be of 6,000 words or less, must be written in English, and must be either unpublished or, for the 2021 award, not published before January 1, 2020. The author must have a track record of published creative writing in the UK or Ireland.

The judges over the past ten years have reflected the power and prestige of the award, and have included Melvyn Bragg, AS Byatt, John Carey, Sarah Churchwell, Carys Davies, Kit de Waal, Anne Enright, Sir Richard Eyre, Sebastian Faulks, Aminatta Forna, Petina Gappah, Tessa Hadley, Mark Haddon, Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi, Mark Lawson, Blake Morrison, Neel Mukherjee, Andrew O’Hagan, David Nicholls, Romesh Gunesekera, Diana Evans, Will Self, Elif Shafak, Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremain, Joanna Trollope and Sarah Waters.

The shortlist will be published in June 2021, and the winner will be announced on July 8th, 2021.