Congratulations to the 2020 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize winners!
1st Prize: The Closed Door
by Alice Haworth-Booth
2nd Prize: To Those Born Later
by Kieran Toms
3rd Prize: Fix
by K. Lockwood Jefford.
Watch our judges Sharmaine Lovegrove, Harriet Moore and Chris Power announce the winners, and
Brick Lane Bookshop owner Denise Jones and Short Story Prize Director Kate Ellis thank everyone who made the prize happen.
The 2020 Longlist
Chameleon – Rea Dennhardt
Fix – K. Lockwood Jefford
Night Classes – Lucy Sweeney Bryne
No Phones at the Dinner Table – Jack Houston
Sharing Time – Gemma Reeves
Small Differences – Huma Qureshi
Spiders – Andrea Watts
The Bhootam in the Tree – Rajasree Variyar
The Bread Man – Kevin Dyer
The Closed Door – Alice Haworth-Booth
To Those Born Later – Kieran Toms
Via del Tramvai – Han Smith
Our 2020 Prize Judges

Dialogue Books is home to stories from illuminating voices often excluded from the mainstream. Its aim is to shine a spotlight on stories for, about and by readers from the LGBTQI+, disability, working class and BAME communities. The imprint has a clear focus of distinctive, cross-genre titles that spark a conversation across fiction, non-fiction, commercial and literary publishing.
Dialogue Books’ authors include Irenosen Okojie, Season Butler and Amer Anwar.
“A short story should be to the point and ambitious and leave the reader with the memory of the story but not aching to find out more. “

“A great short story is one that completely shrinks or expands your world to its parameters, maybe for the duration of reading it, maybe for the rest of your life. It can be about anything, and it can do anything, but for it to be great it needs to take hold of you with tis first word and not let go of you until its last.”

Writers she admires include: Lydia Davies, Joy Williams, Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk, Denise Riley, John Berger, MFK Fisher, Fleur Jaeggy, Jean Rhys, Natalia Ginzburg, Katherine Heiny, Elizabeth Strout, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Jane Bowles, Mary Gaitskill, Laurie Colwin.
“Clarity, energy, unusual and surprising diction; and ‘a moment’ which Flannery O’Connor has described every great story as having, ‘in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected’.”