From the Yangtze river to Ladbroke Grove, the six stories shortlisted for the Guardian and Fourth Estate BAME short story prize offer a whistlestop tour of the contemporary world, taking in environmental disaster and the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower blaze.
Three hundred stories were submitted for the prize for work by black and minority ethnic writers, which is now in its third year. Former shortlistees include Guy Gunaratne, whose debut novel In Our Mad and Furious City was last week longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
In her story Spam, Manchester-born Savannah Burney brings a keen comic sensibility to the the redemptive story of an encounter between a grouchy B&B owner – with a lifelong spam sandwich habit – and a young girl made homeless by the Grenfell fire, who cannot decide if Pot Noodles are halal. A more exotic cuisine animates the imagination of Mai, protagonist of Kit Fan’s City of Culture, who helps out in her granny’s Chinese takeaway in a northern English seaside town as she prepares for a school Brexit debate.
Two of the shortlisted stories are set in China. Yiming Ma’s Swimmer of the Yangtze follows a young man from a rural village to Paralympics victory and back again during the Cultural Revolution. Jason Deelchand’s Something Buried in the Ground spins a chilling fable of environmental betrayal around a girl and her storytelling father.
But there is room for more whimsical worldviews. In Gurnaik Johal’s The Piano, an elderly widower takes a creative approach to grief by leaving his dead wife’s piano out on the street for young lovers to play. In Bus Stop, the writer and editor Varaidzo centres a surreal coming-of-age story on an adolescent whose uncertainties about gender and identity spin her off into a parallel world.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
