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Lisa Dwyer Hogg reads Hamlet, a love story by Lucy Caldwell. The first of the five shortlisted stories for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú National Short Story Award 2024.

Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, and several stage plays and radio dramas. Her latest novel, These Days, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and her latest collection of short stories, Openings, was published by Faber in 2024. She won the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú National Short Story Award in 2021.

The Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú National Short Story Award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. The 2023 winner of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú National Short Story Award was Naomi Wood who won for ‘Comorbidities’, a story examining the difficulty of maintaining love and intimacy in a marriage, from her debut collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (Orion). The 2024 winner will be announced live on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio 4’s Front Row on Tuesday 1 October 2024.

All of the stories are available on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Sounds where you can also download the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú National Short Story Award podcast which includes a Front Row interview with each of the five shortlisted writers.

Abridged by Katrin Williams
Produced by Justine Willett