Last weekend, PhD student Anna Metcalfe achieved every writer's dream - a shortlisting for a prestigious award. For a writer as-yet-unpublished, she's philosophical about being in contention for a £30,000 purse with two Pulitzer-winners.
I was recently shortlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Private Bank Short Story Award - an achievement I had not thought possible, or, indeed, thought about much at all. Like many writers, I am in the habit of entering writing contests. However, this is not so much because I dream of winning, but because they are a useful tool for structuring the editing process. They provide deadlines and, when you spend hours, days and weeks rewriting the same sentence for the eight-hundredth time, a deadline can be a very useful thing. So when I got an email about the longlist, and later another about the shortlist, it was thrilling, but I had little to no idea what to expect.
