Long-time TLC Reader Vicky Grut has been shortlisted for the 2019 Edge Hill University Short Story Prize. Vicky’s collection ‘Live Show, Drink Included’ (Holland Park Press) has been named on a competitive shortlist for the £10,000 prize alongside writers such as Wendy Erskine and David Szalay.
Vicky’s collection was published by Holland Park Press in 2018, and takes inspiration from a range of often ordinary situations, showing how easily things can unravel. The stories veer from the realistic to the surreal, nothing is quite what it seems, and Vicky’s original way of observation is a revelation.
The winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize will be announced at an exclusive Short Story Prize event on 25 October at Waterstones Piccadilly, London. The ceremony will also include a £1,000 Reader’s Choice Award to an author from the shortlist, and a further category for stories by Edge Hill University’s MA Creative Writing students. The students who have been shortlisted this year for the MA prize are: Harry Draper, Molly Smallwood, Carolyn Stockdale, Natalie McCulloch, Steven Kenny and Tamsin James.
This year’s judges are literary heavyweight and last year’s winner, Tessa Hadley; writer and short story expert Elizabeth Baines; and fellow TLC Reader Sam Jordison, who is a writer, journalist and co-founder of Galley Beggar Press.
The Edge Hill Short Story Prize was founded in 2006 by the world’s first Professor of Short Fiction, Ailsa Cox, to highlight the intricate artisanship of short story writing and acknowledge the wealth of published collections available.
The 2018 prize was awarded to Tessa Hadley for Bad Dreams (Cape), with the Readers’ Choice winner going to Sarah Hall for Madame Zero (Faber)
You can buy ‘Live Show, Drink Included: Collected Stories’ here.
About Vicky
Vicky Grut started out on the staff of the independent publishers Lawrence and Wishart in the late 1980s. Titles she edited there, and subsequently as a freelance, ranged from academic texts to a political thriller by the MP Peter Hain. Her own writing has appeared in collections published by Picador, Granta, Duckworth, Serpent’s Tail and Bloomsbury in the UK, and her nonfiction essay ‘Into the Valley’ (Harvard Review #43) was listed as one of the Notable Essays of 2012 in Best American Essays 2013. She has been a lecturer in creative writing for the Open University, London South Bank and the University of Greenwich. Her short story collection Live Show, Drink Included is published by Holland Park Press.
For TLC Vicky reads literary and commercial fiction, and short stories
