The shortlist for the Orange Broadband New Writers Award has been announced:

Clare Allan, POPPY SHAKESPEARE (Bloomsbury)
Karen Connelly, THE LIZARD CAGE (Harvill Secker)
Roopa Farooki, BITTER SWEETS (Macmillan)

“We were very impressed with this year’s submissions for the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers,” said Jackie Kay, poet, novelist and Chair of judges. “We admired the breadth, depth, insight and talent of so many of these books and were spoilt for choice and impressed with the state of women’s fiction today. We are happy to see women take on such big and serious subjects, both personal and political, with such imaginative panache.”

The National Short Story Prize, the largest award for a single short story in the world has announced its nominees:

“Slog’s Dad”, by David Almond
“The Morena”, by Jonathan Falla
“The Orphan and the Mob”, by Julian Gough
“How to Get Away with Suicide” by Jackie Kay
“Weddings and Beheadings” by Hanif Kureshi

The winning story (awarded 15,000 pounds, with the runner-up 3,000 pounds and the rest 500 pounds) will be announced at a breakfast ceremony at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) headquarters in Piccadilly, London on Monday 23 April 2007 and broadcast live at 8.20am on BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme. Atlantic Books will publish the shortlist as a collection of stories in May, and the winning short story will also be published in Prospect magazine.