
1st Prize: The Closed Door – Alice Haworth-Booth
2nd Prize: To Those Born Later – Kieran Toms
3rd Prize: Fix – K. Lockwood Jefford
Shortlisted Stories:
Chameleon – Rea Dennhardt
No Phones at the Dinner Table – Jack Houston
Small Differences – Huma Qureshi
Longlisted Stories:
Night Classes – Lucy Sweeney Bryne
Sharing Time – Gemma Reeves
Spiders – Andrea Watts
The Bhootam in the Tree – Rajasree Variyar
The Bread Man – Kevin Dyer
Via del Tramvai – Han Smith
Watch judges Sharmaine Lovegrove, Harriet Moore and Chris Power announce the winners, and Brick Lane Bookshop owner Denise Jones and Short Story Prize Project Manager Kate Ellis thank everyone who made the prize happen.
PODCAST: Listen to 2020 1st Prize winner Alice Haworth-Booth chat to our bookseller/SSP director Kate Ellis and MIR’s Peter J Coles about her winning story, writing, climate change and books.
‘Full of verve, emotional enquiry and imagination.’ Harriet Moore
‘An illuminating and vivid range of stories from an exciting array of new voices already so accomplished in their craft.’ Sharmaine Lovegrove
‘I really appreciate the range and ambition on display in these stories. These are writers putting work into voice and craft rather than relying on event alone, and that’s what makes their work persist in the mind.’ Chris Power
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’.”