Lancaster writer shortlisted for prestigious BBC National Short Story Award

Jenn Ashworth is one of five writers to make it onto the list for the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University.

The other four shortlisted are poet Vanessa Onwuemezi, writer Saba Sams, crime novelist Anna Bailey, and composer, performer and writer, Kerry Andrew.

Jenn, who was born in Preston, now lives in Lancaster where she is Professor of Writing at Lancaster University. She is a highly regarded novelist and winner of a prestigious Betty Trask Award.

Jenn’s story, Flat 19, is narrated by Eve, a successful artist who is also a wife, mother and daughter. Struggling with being all things to all people, she finds an ingenious way to solve the problem by cloning herself.

Inspired by Doris Lessing’s short story, To Room 19, which explored the competing demands on a middle-class woman in the 1960s, and Ashworth’s pandemic experiences balancing work and home schooling her children while her partner worked for the NHS, the story asks how much has really changed for women and what makes us who we are?

The shortlisted writers are drawn from different disciplines – from music to poetry to crime writing. The judges praised the shortlist for its inventiveness, exuberance, and compassio, with stories inspired by lived experience of inequality, chronic illness, sexual fluidity and the pandemic.

Now in its 17th year, The BBC National Short Story Award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story with the winning author receiving £15,000 and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. The winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Tuesday October 4.

Elizabeth Day, Chair of the 2022 short story award judging panel, said: “A good short story says something meaningful. A great short story keeps certain things hidden. The best short stories find their power on the page precisely because of what the author has decided not to say.

"Our five shortlisted stories are fine examples of this talent.

"Every one of these writers has taken great care to choose the shining details that arrest our attention, to inflect their paragraphs with precision and unique lyrical flair without ever losing grip on the pace or purpose of the story in question.

"These stories represent the new vanguard of British writing and I am confident that the future of the short story is in safe hands.”