Costa: serving more than coffee

**The Costa Short Story Award was launched in 2012 in conjunction with the prestigious Costa Book Award, but judged independently. Costa UK marketing director Kevin Hydes outlines that the “short story award is open to absolutely everyone…extend[ing]the reach of the book awards in ways we never have before. You don’t need a publisher or an agent to enter this competition, just an idea and writing talent”.**

Winners for the 2013 prize were announced on Tuesday 29th January. Avril Joy won for her story, _Millie and Bird_, whilst Chioma Okereke and Guy Le Jeune came second and third respectively for _Trompette de la Mort_ and _Small Town Removal_.

Caroline Lallis
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_Millie and Bird_ by Avril Joy – **WINNER**

This is the short story of a nameless narrator’s dealings with her family and their neighbour one summer’s day, drawing the reader into what feels like a real world that allows us to really care for the people in it.

Against the backdrop of a far from ideal childhood setting, the intimacy between the two sisters, the eponymous Millie and her sister, our narrator, is genuinely touching. Although it is clear that our narrator wants to escape, whether through a half abandoned dream of being a lawyer or late nights out with friends, she feels responsible for her day-dreaming younger sister and cares for her as their actual mother falls short. Despite the long shadows of doubt and disappointment cast over the two girls, the hope that is still present is what keeps the story readable, with moments of kindness and humour; Jonty giving Millie the bird for example, or his numerous slogan t-shirts. These moments of optimism, however, also serve to make the ending all the more heart-breaking.

The story finishes with Millie asking her older sister to pray with her, “Say a prayer,’ she says. And I do.’ And we say it with her, to keep their and our hopes alive.

Rebekah Ellerby
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_Trompette de la Mort_ by Chioma Okereke

Chioma Okereke is one of this year’s two runners up in the inaugural Costa Short Story Prize. She was born in Nigeria and came to England when she was seven. Her writing career began as a poet before fiction and her debut novel, _Bitter Leaf_, was published by Virago Press in 2010. She is currently working on her next book.

Her short story _Trompette de la Mort_ is told amongst the dense, secretive forests of northern France; a woman’s confession to her dead children in which she closely gathers together life and death. Bernard, her husband’s love for picking mushrooms becomes an image of her; she is the ‘Trompette de la Mort’ which she first hears as ‘Trompette de l’amour’ and it is this symbolic misapprehension of his feelings for her that haunts their relationship. The image of the mushroom is many faceted. Both delicate and reviled; a discovery and a hallucinogen; of love, or of death. The mushrooms thrive in the deadliest environment.

The place the narrator and Bernard first make love is a forest named your’ grave; something not revealed to the implied ‘reader’ until later into the narrative. Life happens very quickly in this short story and its events are made to feel inevitable with relaxed narration and fast paced progression, so even its most shocking parts feel as though a matter of course and paradoxically it is this which makes them shake you with terror.

Dan Mountain
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_Small Town Removal_ by Guy Le Jeune

_Small Town Removal_ is a brilliant evocation of a particular moment in a particular place. Over the course of the story we meet Michael – a man awaiting the funeral of his father, and we slowly unravel his past.

What is so brilliant about how this story is told, is the use of the first person. It throws us right in to the moment with Michael, and allows the writer room to focus on constructing Michael’s natural train of thought.

The story is told on two levels. On the first we are shown small town Ireland, with all its glorious idiosyncrasies. On the other, we are taken on a meandering path of reflection. I think this does a great service to reflecting the state of mind of Michael and really gets us invested in the now as well as the then.

One of the particular joys of this story, and perhaps all short fiction in general, is that it invites us to stop and think with Michael. In this story we are given the space to stop and consider the barking dogs, the drinking women, and rushing of the distant weir. This is a condensed and deep experience, constructed in brilliantly simplistic language.

Francesca Peak
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_Don’t Try This at Home_ by Angela Readman

In this twelve-page tour de force, Readman tells the tale of a wife and husband who, in order to be more productive and financially secure as a couple, decide to cut the husband in half with a spade in their back garden. Sounds insane, right? But if you think about it, having more than one of you is pretty advantageous. Think of the work you could do, the social life you could have, if there were two of you, taking life in shifts and being in two places at once. Sounds like a beautiful solution to an everyday problem.

However, issues arise when Daniel decides to cut himself up again…and again…and again until there were so many that the wife, our narrator, loses count and has to keep track of their several jobs and locations at any given time. I also wonder how she knows which Daniel is the ‘real’ one, I don’t think she does, yet is willing to go to bed with any Daniel who happens to be around.

In a hugely enjoyable tale, Readman allows the husband to exhibit several facets of his personality – the taxi driver with a blonde wife and three kids or the engineer sleeping with a buxom brunette – however questions what strain this has on his marriage. It’s an interesting take on relationships and especially the stresses of modern marriage, where being in two places at once or, indeed, two people at once has its highs and lows.

Rebekah King
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_Mown Grass_ by Salley Vickers.

With a couple of destitute daughters, a penchant for losing his fortune on the stock market and a demanding wife who prefers a snooze with the spaniels to a night of passion, the life of Robin Stanbridge sounds downright depressing. Not to worry though: by the time we get there, said henpeckee has kicked the proverbial bucket and is confounding his grasping relatives with a strange will that leaves a legacy to the housekeeper (of all people).

One need hardly employ a Holmesian degree of deduction to guess why Robin favours this unattached, mysteriously attractive and spaniel-free serving woman, and although I enjoy a good family scandal as much as the next person this one, sadly, reads a little too much like a work of erotic escapism for the sort of men who buy Country Life magazine. The prose is clean-cut with a pleasingly accessible register, but characters fade to stereotype just as they’re getting interesting, and it’s a shame that that enticing scent of mown grass never fully rises from the page. It’s a good enough story, and worth a read, but the tale of repressed-Robin and his orbit of dissatisfied females just doesn’t quite do it for me.

Lillian Hingley
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_Dislocation_ by Sheila Llewellyn

With its initial focus on the gallery, _Dislocation_ is shown to be aptly titled in its dealing with the transference of paintings. This transference comes in a plethora of ways, from the European influences that accumulate in order to create the paintings of Irishman Le Brocquy, to a portrait’s physical movement from exhibition to exhibition.

However, this may make one argue that these allusions and worldly tours demonstrate an assimilation of art – how can this all be representative of ‘dislocation’?

Llewellyn appears to set up a deceptive wholeness of the painting in the first half of her story in order to demolish such appearances in the second, allowing the neutrality of the history and meaning of art to become once again contextualized and painful. The protagonist’s work experience in Gemäldegalerie, a Berlin art gallery that had its works distributed between East and West Germany after WWII, encompasses a shattered identity that is perhaps appreciated more if one goes on to research what Le Brocquy’s fragmented piece named ‘Family’ looks like.

However, you can also get this sense of the destroyed appearances of things if _Dislocation_ is read with its audio version, for Constantine Gregory’s switching between accents demonstrates a code-switching that presents a constant shift, questioning whether the meaning of art can ever be so steadfast.