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There’s no doubt about it, the short story is having “a moment”. It started this time last year, when Lydia Davis, not so much a short-story writer as a short-short-story writer (some of her tales are only a sentence long) won the Man Booker International Prize, a decision that took the literary world by storm. When Davis’ triumph was followed by a Nobel Prize for the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, people started to mutter that something significant was afoot. While two successive prizes could be coincidence, the renaissance of the short story was confirmed when the American George Saunders won the inaugural Folio Prize at the start of the year for Tenth of December. Something of a writer’s writer – beloved of Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen – Saunders was catapulted into public view and on to the bestseller lists. And with him – blushing as it cast off its “Who? Little old me?” mantle – went short-form fiction. Saunders, Munro and Davis are not the first short-story writers to be lauded by the mainstream. The “Chekhov of the suburbs”, John Cheever won a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1979, as did Jhumpa Lahiri for her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, in 2000. But it’s been a while since the short story, long the poor relation of the novel, experienced such consistent and growing adulation. While mainstream prizes are generating interest in the short story, they alone are not responsible for it reaching tipping point. Industry insiders allude to the rise in high-profile, short-story-specific prizes: the Costa Short Story Award, the BBC National Short Story Award, the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition. The BBC award was won last year by the Man Booker-shortlisted author Sarah Hall, the Harper’s Bazaar award was shared by the novelists Fatima Bhutto and Jill Dawson. Suddenly big-name novelists are happy to be seen in the company of short stories, with literary big guns turning their attention to short form like never before. Jon McGregor did so with his collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You. Hilary Mantel joins the fray, with a collection out this autumn, as does the crime maestro Ian Rankin, and Margaret Atwood, long a master of the art.
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