Anna Metcalfe joins Elizabeth Strout, Adam Johnson, Jonathan Tel, Tahmima Anam and Marjorie Celona on shortlist
The young British author Anna Metcalfe is up against two Pulitzer prize-winning American writers on the shortlist for the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG short story award.
Metcalfe, who is 26 and lives in Norwich, is in the process of finishing her first collection of short stories. She was selected by judges from among 650 entries for her story Number Three. Metcalfe's tale tells of a British teacher working at a Chinese school, with cultural differences resulting in "devastating consequences" for his young Chinese host. She was inspired to write the story, she said, after spending a year in China working for the British Council, "which sparked off a lot of ideas about cultural exchange and the different degrees of success with which different people are able to translate themselves for others and for different kinds of cultural environments".
Metcalfe's piece is competing with stories from Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer for her novel Olive Kitteridge, and Adam Johnson, who took the prestigious US fiction award for The Orphan Master's Son. Johnson's short story Nirvana is set in the near future, as a man's wife deteriorates from a wasting illness, and Strout's Snow Blind is a decade-spanning tale taking place in rural America.
The shortlist for the prize, the world's richest for a single short story, also includes Anwar Gets Everything, the disturbing tale of a Bangladeshi construction worker in Dubai by the award-winning British/Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam, and British author Jonathan Tel's The Shoe King of Shanghai, in which a migrant to Beijing steals shoes from a funeral and tries to sell them on.
Canadian-American author Marjorie Celona rounds out the shortlist with Othello, in which a man remembers his autistic step-brother. "In the summer of 1987, I was seventeen and Wolf was six, and I was making him sort my records on account of his losing a bet that the Bee Gees were girls," Celona writes.
"What's remarkable about this year's shortlist is not just the power of the writing but the astonishing diversity of imaginative approaches. Choosing a winner will be a real headache," said judge and critic John Carey. The judging panel also includes the comic and novelist David Baddiel, the authors Sarah Hall and Elif Shafak, and the Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate.
The winner will be announced on 4 April; he or she will take home £30,000, with the five shortlisted authors each receiving £1,000. Previous winners of the award, which has been running since 2010, include Junot Díaz, Kevin Barry and CK Stead. No British author – or woman – has yet won the prize.
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