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Acclaimed actor Mark Strong reads Will Boast’s shortlisted entry for this year’s Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú National Short Story. Here courage and friendship emerge from a clash of cultures in a Sicilian village.

Will Boast is the author of a story collection, Power a memoir, Epilogue (Liveright/Norton and Granta Books, 2015), and a novel, Daphne. His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The American Scholar, among other publications. He's held fellowships from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, the American Academy in Rome, and the University of East Anglia, and he's taught at the University of Chicago, the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome, and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Mark Strong, a household name for film and theatre goers and the small screen. Recent film credits include The Critic, Kingsman 2 and for stage A View From the Bridge, and forthcoming, Oedipus.

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 Rowan Routh
Produced by Elizabeth Allard