To someone of my generation - and a boy, to boot - it’s not surprising that someone who writes in the spirit of John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard has sold more than 120 million books. I did ask, rhetorically, at our recording with the veteran novelist Wilbur Smith whether there comes a stage when even a publisher stops counting…but I suppose that’s not allowed.

The point is that he knows how to write an adventure story, and for those of us who were taken into dreamland by King Solomon’s Mines or by the adventures of Richard Hannay, or indeed by R.L. Stevenson and Jules Verne, the success of Smith’s stories - sagas, I suppose - is easy to explain.

But explaining why people want to read them isn’t the same as explaining how they’re written.

The art of story-telling - putting together a page-turner - is, I suspect, a skill that some people just develop naturally.

But the truth is that it is rare. We all know books that purport to spin a great yarn that simply don’t work, usually because they’re formulaic and the language is stale. Keeping a spring in your prose and turning every plot corner in style is a skill that is in short supply.

I asked Smith for the secret of a good story, and his answer was, I think, the perfect one: ‘You have to make the people believe in your characters, it’s just a matter of faith. Your characters have to act in a certain way, to be believable, and you have to generate an interest in your readers for them to follow the story - for it to be important for them that these people survive.’

That is part of the secret of his style, but there is also the setting - the Africa that he came to love as a boy. It was wild, dangerous and mysterious.

Our book this month is When the Lion Feeds, the first of his novels dealing with the Courtney family (published in 1964) and reflecting the excitements of his own youth. He was about 30 when he wrote the story of the twins Sean and Garrick, the first a lion-hearted adventurer and his brother a more thoughtful, emotional soul.

Smith says he identifies more easily with Garrick - ‘I was at boarding school and I know the top dogs are hard to compete with. I wasn’t top dog. I was third team rugby, not first, I didn’t get colours.’ But Sean’s appetite for the wildness of Africa in the era of the Zulu wars in the 1870s and 80s was a reflection of Wilbur’s own, when his father - a bushman, he calls him - introduced him to the sounds and smells of the open places, and the creatures of the forests and the veld. His boyhood gave him an enduring love of the continent - all its peoples and their customs, the incomers and the native.

This month’s group of readers were naturally interested in how his views had altered in the half century through which southern Africa has changed so radically. He was born in Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1933 and his world was unrecognisable to a contemporary generation. He acknowledged that he would certainly have written quite differently a generation later - that’s inevitable - but the guts of the story would have been the same.

He was always interested in the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, and said that the relationships between his parents and grandparents and the indigenous people around them was a close and fascinating one. He doesn’t think that human nature has changed with the passage of time - ‘I have learnt in my life there are good people and bad people and the good ones outnumber the bad.’

In a way, it’s his motto. He likes stories that pit goodies against baddies - on the land, in the mines, in the scramble for wealth on the trading floor - and in the 37 books that followed this one he’s demonstrated that he understands instinctively how to draw his readers into his own enthusiasms.

That’s the mark of a born storyteller, and although he trained to become an accountant it’s hard to imagine him finding the excitements the he loves in the mysterious world of double-entry bookkeeping.

I hope you enjoy our conversation about When the Lion Feeds.

Next month, we’ll turn to a quite different kind of novel - The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, a poetic story about the poet John Clare and his incarceration in an Essex asylum in the early Victorian era. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and if you don’t know it, you have a treat in store.

Happy reading

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

 

We want to encourage as many budding writers and short story enthusiasts to send in their work as possible – our only submission requirement is that writers haven’t had their work broadcast on network radio before.  Stories come in from around the world, from authors about to publish their first novel, to students of creative writing, from bookslam regulars to passionate amateurs. Perhaps a literary star of the future will be among the submissions we receive. 

This year, we were incredibly impressed by the wealth of talent on display. From science fiction to historical fiction, romance to tragedy, the stories have transported us from dazzling coastlines to windswept mountains, from kitchen sinks to far off galaxies.  

Based on our reading we draw the following tentative conclusions about what has inspired this year’s contributors.

1)            Coastline. Being based in London we don’t always feel that visceral connection to the sea, but for many of you the seashore remains a place of rumination, introspection and powerful resonance. Many of our stories drew on the imaginative power of the sea, with an emphasis on drizzly, grey days over packed beaches and dropped ice cream.

2)            Post-apocalyptic / dystopian worlds. Whether it’s the effect of geek culture going mainstream, the tremendous popularity of YA fiction, or a sense of pessimism about the age we live in, many of you created bleak and unsettling worlds for us. The best of these were incredibly inventive about life after global catastrophe. Hollywood should come calling!

3)            Reflection on past tragedy. The short story can be the perfect medium for explorations of memory and guilt, and we received quite a few stories which meditated upon the idea of the past intruding into the present. Sometimes the memories were of young love or early optimism but more often we met characters grappling with wrong turns taken or happiness spurned.

We offer huge thanks to everyone who submitted a story to us. From the most melancholic of stories to comedic romps the range of tales told was huge. These broad conclusions should not be taken as indicators of what we are looking for, or of how to succeed in the future. What continually astounded us was the variety of voice, narrative, style and setting.

We encourage everyone to keep on writing, and please set a date in your diary to hear the readings of our three selected stories: Baker, Emily and Me by Claire Fuller on Friday 29 August at 1545; Audiophile by Ian Green on Friday 5 September at 1545 and The Fox by Fiona Melrose on Friday 12 September at 1545.

Gemma Jenkins is the Producer of Opening Lines

 

Find out more about Opening Lines

BBC The Writers Room: Responsive and proactive, the BBC writersoom finds and champions talent

Donna Tartt is not a gushing author. My first question when she came to Bookclub was whether she felt she could now explain the impact of The Secret History, more than twenty years after its publication, or the reason for the spell that it casts on so many readers. That wasn’t a good question to ask an author, she said. Oh well. I’ll try harder next time. But in the course of the next half hour our readers did learn a good deal about Donna the writer – her absorption in classical literature, her admiration for Dickens (‘no one is better at characterisation’) and her development of the character of Richard, who narrates The Secret History. And we got her own account of the spirit of The Secret History – that it is a book about altered states of consciousness.

To begin at the beginning, if you didn’t fall for the book in the nineties when it became a worldwide cult, it’s been accurately described as a detective story in reverse. We find out in the prologue who has been killed, and part of the story of his murder. The book therefore becomes a why-dun-it, and we’re drawn into the closed, fevered world of the group of classics students at a liberal arts college in New England, whose repressed emotions are unleashed with terrible consequences for Bunny, one of their number. Donna Tartt’s college experience was in the same milieu – she was hooked on classics, and lived in a small college community in Vermont. It was there that she started to write the book, when she was 19. It took her ten years, and she explained why: she writes meticulously and methodically, working rather like a miniaturist and enjoying the detail in every paragraph. Since The Secret History was published in 1992 she’s written only two books – The Little Friend, ten years after her debut and The Goldfinch this year – and clearly has no interest in working at anything except her natural pace. The Donna Tartt who revealed herself to our readers is intellectually rigorous, determined to avoid a throwaway remark that hasn’t been thought through, and someone immersed in the emotional lives of her characters.

She spoke particularly interestingly about Richard, the student who tells the story and who is the outsider in the group, having come east from California and from a background much less privileged than that of his new friends. His position allows him to speak with a degree of clarity about them, because he instinctively stands back a little: like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, he learns a good deal in the course of his narrative. He is deceived, he’s confused, and he knows that at times he may not be telling the truth. When it’s over he hopes that one of the students, Camilla, might marry him but she turns him down. It’s therefore not surprising that at the end of the story, Richard leaves Vermont behind and goes back west, turning away from a world of which he never felt fully a part. You may remember that Nick Carraway did the same thing.

By the time our conversation was over, we had learned a good deal about Donna Tartt’s approach to writing and her immersion in the strange, compulsive world of these students – the story a modern version of The Bacchae, she told us – and I wondered whether we might even discover how she stumbled on the idea. We did. It came to her one day in the post office when she’d gone to pick up her mail.

But she couldn’t explain why. Nor could she explain her interest in Dionysiac ritual, with a history stretching into antiquity. That was the point. It was because she couldn’t explain it that she had to write the novel - ‘I don’t have a gift for condensation.’ And she laughed.

I hope you enjoy the programme. Our next, on the first Sunday in February, will feature Khaled Husseini on The Kite Runner, and our next recording is with the Irish writer John Banville on his Man Booker prize winner, The Sea. We’re meeting him on March 18, and if you want to be one of the reading group, do let us know via the Radio 4 website.

Happy reading

Jim

 

Listen to Bookclub

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites

Sometimes it takes decades for the meaning of a book to make itself plain. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published during the year of my conception and I didn’t come across it until it was already two decades old. Even then the mass of middle class, Western women were still living the life prescribed for them and persuading themselves of their own contentment. At the time, whatever Friedan had to say about women, domesticity, motherhood and careers resonated little with me, as part of my family came from West Africa. Here, the idea of a woman not working would have been viewed as extraordinary, rather than the reverse.  Also, like a great many young women growing up with choices, I thought I was free.

Later, I came to Betty Friedan through one of her followers: Gloria Steinem. Sometime in the 1980’s I read an essay by Steinem in which she used the phrase, ‘the power of the gaze’, to describe the freedom men have to look - and keep looking - at women in public spaces. Men can and do stare at women all the time. If a man, a stranger, stares at a woman and she accidentally meets his gaze, it’s inevitably she who will look away. If she stares back at him, she’s issuing either an invitation or a challenge. Men possess the power of the gaze, women do not.

Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem taught me a new way of seeing: how the smallest things constrain, how even the most apparently trivial act may be suffused with power. Everywhere men stared, whilst women averted their eyes. Men whistled and women pretended not to hear. It looked and felt wrong to me, unkind to stare at a person in such a way as to make her uncomfortable in her own skin, but I was told it was ‘natural’, flattering even. The builders hanging off the scaffolding yelling at young women walking alone - that wasn’t hectoring. That was just boys being boys. The word ‘objectify’ has been used about women so much over the decades since, it has all but lost its meaning. But this is what it is to objectify - to strip a person of subjectivity, such that you do not think, or perhaps care, what she is feeling when she is being stared at. Just as Betty Friedan said that women weren’t happy when they were being told they should be; Gloria Steinem said women weren’t flattered, even though they were told they should be.

There will be those men (and women) who tell me some women like it. There will be those men who say what a dreary world it would be if a man couldn’t look at a pretty girl. And I will say this: maybe so, but wouldn’t it be better if we were as free to stare as you.

Listen online to Feminine Mystiques: What To Expect after broadcast on Friday 9th August

What to Expect is the second story in a series of three. You can read the inspiration behind the first story, Mink by Marina Warner, here. The third and final story is Theatre Six by Sarah Hall and will be broadcast on 16^thAugust at 3.45pm. 

Explore a selection of feminist programming

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

This month’s Bookclub takes us into a space that feels timeless, because it’s where the sensibility of a contemporary character Ella (who lives in Boston) meets poetry from 13th century Turkey and where we discover the enticing world, unknown to most of us I’m sure, of Sufi mysticism.

Elif Shafak, our guest, is the bestselling woman novelist in Turkey, and writer of The Forty Rules of Love, a story which brings a contemporary woman – Ella – in touch with the mystic poet Rumi, who danced around with whirling dervishes seven centuries ago in the near east, via the manuscript of a novel written about Rumi by Aziz. It opens Ella up to a story of love and devotion, obsession and murder.

The Forty Rules of Love obviously spoke quite directly to our readers. One of them asked if there was something particular about the number 40 – she’d just passed that birthday, she remembered the biblical account of the 40 days in the wilderness, and she noted that Aziz, one of the principal figures in the book and a writer, is dying at the age of 40…

The answer from Elif was that the question wasn’t surprising: she’d heard it before. Think of the tradition of 40 days mourning, and the same period before a baby is traditionally taken out for the first time – a span of days that seems to flow through Islamic, Christian and Jewish cultures. Her message was that the book had been for her an exploration of that connection, the closeness of traditions that we’re often encouraged to see as distant from each other, or hostile.

She became interested in the Islamic practice of Sufi mysticism when she was in her twenties. She told us, “I’ve always believed that Islamic mysticism, Jewish and Christian mysticism have so much in common. Also with Daoism and far eastern philosophies. It seeks oneness, and that I would say is at the heart of Sufi philosophy. It’s a very inner-related philosophy.”

Elif spoke interestingly about the way that the story of ancient Sufi practices has withered away in Turkey, to her regret. The modernisation of the country in recent times involved a sharp break with the past. But as she travelled across Europe – east to west – Elif said she recognized that the voice of the poet Rumi, rolling down the centuries, spoke about love in a way that people still recognized. “To me that was the most important thing,” she said.

Her own journey, which I think emerges quite clearly in the programme, is from her political and emotional position when she was in her early 20s – “anarchist, nihilist, feminist, leftist…” – to the enticing world of Rumi and the dervish Shams, who dies by plunging into a well without making a splash, and the modern Ella who’s brought into contact with a world that is distant in time but becomes familiar. It also seems, surprisingly, to make sense.

The book uses a certain amount of historical material (about Rumi and Shams) although that story is, of course, shot through with legend and the embroidery of the centuries. Almost Elif Shafak’s last words to all of us at the recording were, “I am an emotional person’. That was no surprise.

I do hope you enjoy the programme on The Forty Rules of Love, on Sunday April 7th at 4pm, and again on Thursday April 11th at 3.30pm.

Our next recordings are with Jim Crace at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival on April 24th on Quarantine, and with Paul Theroux on June 6 (Dark Star Safari) and Deborah Moggach on June 20th (Tulip Fever), both in London. Let us know if you’d like to be with us at those events.

Happy reading

Jim

 

Listen to the progamme

Download the Bookclub podcast

I was on the first train from Manchester Piccadilly to Sheffield this morning; the 0545, chugging its way slowly across the tops, from one great city to another. My carriage was surprisingly full: there was a young woman who was wolfing down a bacon sarnie as though she’d not eaten for weeks, a man who insisted to the guard that he wanted to go to Edinburgh this way and not the easy way and a man who’d missed the last train the night before slept in a bus shelter, or so he told the silent woman in the sensible suit.

I thought, as I often do, that I’d like those people to write a memoir, to fill in the details of the lives I’d glimpsed on that early journey. Why did that man want to go Edinburgh via a particular route, and what was that young woman’s first memory of a bacon sarnie?

I wrote my own memoir in verse, ‘Talking Myself Home’ a few years ago; I’d just turned fifty and I wanted to take stock of a life that was as ordinary and unusual as everybody else’s. I wrote about my parents, who’d met as pen pals during the war; I wrote about my teachers, like the gravel-voiced Mr. Brown. I wrote about the jobs I’d had on the building site and at the tennis-ball factory, and I wrote about my life as a man of many words. What I found was that the more I wrote, the more I cast my net into the deceptively calm seas of memory, the more I remembered.

Why don’t you have a go at writing your life? You’ll hear examples on the programme of people who took that difficult first step of putting pen to paper (or fingertip to keybord) and you’ll get a little practical help on how to begin.

Think of the stories your family tells; think of how you ended up where you are, how your parents met, who the significant people in your life were when you were young. Think of your teachers and the smells and sounds of the classroom. Think of the first time you saw the sea, the first time you saw a dustbin lorry, the first time you got on a bus. If you’ve kept letters or objects from the past, have a look at them. Look at them for a long time; listen to what they’re saying to you.

Keep a notebook and write things down as you remember them; don’t worry about a shape for the memoir at this stage. A shape will emerge; after all, you’re the shape.

And remember, everybody’s got a story to tell. Everyone’s life is interesting. I wish I’d asked those people on that train this morning to tell me their tales. Mind you, they might be reading this… So if you feel inspired, go ahead, write the first line of your memoir in the comment box below, and you’re on your way.

Listen to Eat, Pray, Write. Guests include Helena Drysdale who teaches memoir writing, and Helena Tym who has written her own memoir.

How to write a memoir

You already know as avid listeners what a brilliant medium radio is, and at some point you've probably encountered a programme that was so compelling, emotionally engaging and informing that you stopped what you were doing and stayed hooked to the radio, well that's what the judges for The Writer's Prize are looking for.

Whether you are writing drama or comedy we want to see bold, ambitious ideas, rich, funny, complex comedy characters, scripts that will resonate and make us want to hear your idea on the radio and see those characters come to life.

Years ago I directed the first radio play by the then unknown writer Lee Hall. I Luv You Jimmy Spud. The imagery and ideas were so inspiring they literally leapt out of the radio into our hearts and minds. The main character Jimmy was a little Geordie lad, interviewed by the Angel Gabriel for the chance to become an angel and save his Dad who was dying of cancer. Jimmy encountered prejudice and suspicion but was determined to change the course of history. Because radio inhabits our imagination and allows us to into the world created by the writer, no one was in any doubt that Jimmy had wings and could jump off the Tyne Bridge. Jimmy Spud was full of humour and humanity, intimate and epic at the same time. So your writing can involve talking horses, personal tragedies, Dickens London, the possibilities are endless but you must know who your characters are, what they want to say and why you want to write this particular comedy or drama.

The majority of R4 drama is a single authored piece and allows the writer incredible freedom but you've got to have enough story, complexity, twists and turns to keep the audience listening for a full 45 minutes.

Remember everyone in the audience will dress their characters differently, visualise the world in a distinct and unique way; in the main it's a one to one experience and that relationship allows you to tell stories in ways that that you wouldn't be able to in other mediums.

So if you've got a story to tell why not take the chance and enter The Writer's Prize which has opened its doors to original drama and comedy scripts.

My fellow judges writer Roy Williams, writer/performer Miles Jupp and commissioners Caroline Raphael and Jeremy Howe are all excited by what this award might bring. So don't miss the closing date of 3 December 2012, and get writing, and here's a round-up of some of the very good reasons why any writer should want to write for radio:

• BBC radio is by far the biggest single commissioner of original drama and comedy in the world - full stop.
• You can get amazingly successful and celebrated actors to be in your radio comedy or play - and they don't even need to shave/do make up/commit to weeks of filming.
• Radio is the cinema of the airwaves - it's all about the visual world conjured up in the listener's head, and the ambition and scope the writer brings to it.
• You can take your story, characters and listeners anywhere in the known (or unknown) universe without the budgetary constrictions you'd get with a film or TV shoot.

Here are some useful links which you might find helpful to get you started. Good luck!

Kate Rowland, Creative Director, New Writing

• The Writer's Prize
• The Writer's Prize - Why write for radio?
• Steven Canny - Exec Producer, BBC Radio Comedy interview with top tips for writers
• Radio drama and comedy scripts from our online Script Library
• Writing Radio Drama
• Writing Radio Comedy

The 7th century St Cuthbert Gospel - the earliest intact European book

In a nondescript seminar room in the British Library, Melvyn Bragg and I sit waiting at a conference table. We are there to interview the library's Lead Curator of Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts, Claire Breay, who after greeting us has disappeared into the bowels of the building to retrieve a prop.

After a few minutes she reappears, carrying a small wooden box. It doesn't look much, but it contains an object so precious that it's kept in a strongroom, and only one person - Claire - is allowed to handle it.

She slides off the lid to reveal a small linen-wrapped package. There is an undeniable tension in the room as she removes this protective covering to reveal a small leather-bound volume.

This is the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest surviving European book, produced in Northumbria in the 7th century; it owes its immaculate condition to the fact that it spent the first four hundred years of its existence in the saint's coffin.

A great privilege, to see such treasure at close quarters. But over the course of a few weeks in November while recording In Our Time: The Written World, Melvyn and I had several of these memorable encounters.

In the atmospheric library of Durham Cathedral, Richard Gameson showed us a detail in a medieval Gospel and casually let slip that we were looking at the oldest illuminated manuscript in the Western world. In Cambridge, Simon Schaffer showed us one of Newton's most celebrated experiments, described (and drawn) in the scientist's own hand.

And then there was the never-to-be-repeated day in the British Library, when in the space of a few hours we were shown a dizzying array of priceless objects: the world's oldest printed book (not European but Chinese, produced in 868); the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf; and not one but two Gutenberg Bibles.

When Melvyn and I first came up with the idea for this series early last year, our intention was to investigate how the inherent qualities of writing have shaped intellectual history. We wanted the focus to be artefacts: tablets, manuscripts and books, all of which in some way represented a turning point in the history of ideas.

Choosing the right ones was quite a challenge: five programmes, it turns out, is not much airtime to tell such a vast and complex story. So we asked some of the academics who regularly appear on In Our Time for advice. Their recommendations, and those of the institutions we visited, made up an almost bewildering list of goodies - ruthlessly and reluctantly pruned back to a more manageable fifteen or so.

Having a wishlist of precious objects is one thing; getting to see them quite another. But we were treated with great indulgence by all the institutions we approached: the British Library gave us wonderful access to some of the greatest things in their collection; Cambridge University Library filled a meeting room with Korans, history scrolls and - wonder of wonders - Newton's student notebooks; and in Durham we saw one of the earliest copies of Bede's Ecclesiastical History.

If I have one regret, it's that we left so much untouched.

We squeezed in all we could, but it would have been nice to have had time to discuss Jewish scriptures, Islamic science, the birth and spread of the novel, the impact of writing on politics... the list goes on.

Perhaps one day we'll have an opportunity to fill some of these gaps. And no doubt we missed all sorts of unmissable documents, turning points in the history of the written word that should have been included - if so, please feel free to let us know!

Tom Morris is producer of In Our Time

• The Written World is only available to download as a podcast until Monday but after that you will still be able to listen online.
• BBC News slideshow: The books that shaped history
• You can listen to the whole In Our Time archive on the Radio 4 web site - the largest programme archive at the BBC.
• Get In Our Time delivered to your computer automatically every week - sign up for the In Our Time podcast.
• Sign up for the free In Our Time newsletter weekly update written by Melvyn Bragg - often while he's crossing St James's Park.
• Last year in The Guardian, Radio reviewer Elisabeth Mahoney asked "Is In Our Time Radio 4's best programme?" - Do you agree? Tell us in the comments.

From 1949, archive caption reads: "Miss Stevie Smith, poet, one of the finalists in the BBC Third Programme Short Story Competition, reading her story Sunday at Home"

Short stories and contributions from writers are an integral part of Radio 4's programming. This week Michael Morpurgo gave, I believe, the most moving contribution to our coverage of the tragic events in Norway in an eloquent essay in which he spoke of Beowolf and the meaning of that ancient legend of struggle set in Scandinavia. One of the commissions I am most pleased with since coming to Radio 4 is the series of Letters to the Arab World, commissioned from Arab writers and broadcast in the early days of the Arab Spring. If this appeals to you I recommend another series of letters, again by leading writers, which will be prominently scheduled at the tenth anniversary of 9/11, entitled The 9/11 Letters. We have already broadcast two of the Booker prize longlist titles and there are another two to look forward to in August and September: A Sense of Ending by Julian Barnes and On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry. We are and will remain the largest commissioner of short stories; we broadcast 150 original single plays a year, 40 of which are by new writers to radio; we broadcast three dramas a day as well as a raft of regular arts programmes such as Front Row, Open Book, Saturday Review and many others. My commitment to broadcasting new writing is underscored by the launch this coming weekend of a new arts commission: a poetry workshop presented by the poet Ruth Padel. All this is alongside regular daily adaptations and dramatisations of classic and contemporary literature.

There seems to be widespread misunderstanding about the level of reduction in the number of short stories to be broadcast on Radio 4 from next April. For those who are interested in the details they are as follows: as part of an Autumn schedule change I am proposing to extend The World At One by fifteen minutes. One of the results of this is that I have had to reduce the number of scheduled short stories. I have already said that the reduction will be about a third but let me be more precise. The number of stories will be reduced from 144 to 104 next year from April. I will broadcast in addition (and with great pleasure) the 5 shortlisted stories from the BBC National Short Story Award. Radio 4 Extra will launch in October a new strand of programmes highlighting short stories which will draw from the rich archive as well as commissioning some 25 new stories from publications. Thus for the listener the total loss of scheduled short stories across both networks is approximately 10. I have invited the Society of Authors to talk to me today in order to clarify our plans and I have already met Bernie Corbet from the Writers' Guild.

Arts and cultural programming, as all Radio 4 listeners know, are at the heart of our schedule and I plan to keep it that way.

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra

• Guardian: John Plunkett's article this morning on the Short Stories campaign
• BBC Press Office - Autumn changes to Radio 4 schedule
• The Radio 4 schedule
• The full caption for the picture from teh archive reads: "BBC Third Programme Story Competition: Stevie Smith : Sunday at Home 20/04/1949 © BBC Picture shows Miss Stevie Smith, poet, one of the finalists in the BBC Third Programme Short Story Competition, reading her story Sunday at Home, broadcast on Wednesday, April 20th 1949."

The nice people at Book Trust have sent us some pictures from the awards ceremony Monday night - and there are more here on Flickr.

Shortlisted Lionel Shriver's got an excellent piece about short stories in The Independent. She writes:

Exchange Rates, short-listed last month for the National Short Story Award, was the first proper short story I've written since I was 22. While a couple of other "stories" have been published meantime, they were both, sneakily, excerpts from novels.

And in The Times, Margaret Drabble, a judge, writes:

Short stories aren't just very short novels, although a few celebrated writers, including John Updike and Alice Munro, have published volumes using overlapping characters or imagined neighbourhoods that create an effect of a tapestry of interwoven lives -- not a continuous novel, but a series of episodes, cumulatively evoking a time or a place or a way of life.

Book blogger Elisabeth Baines (Fiction Bitch) likes the winner:

...short stories, as I'm frequently saying, are closer to poetry than novels, and this short story bears all the hallmarks of that: a linguistic attention and the structural and verbal patterning at which Clanchy as a poet is supremely practised, and it is these elements which create the control of emotion and tone for which this story has been rightly praised, and make it so moving.

Charlotte Williams, blogging for The Bookseller, is particularly pleased with the podcast:

Perhaps a small thing in itself - and of course Radio 4 has long been a champion of the form - but this podcast could be seen as part of a bigger scheme: with short story collections notoriously difficult to sell in print, maybe people are waking up to the different ways to get the form out there?

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• The winner was announced live on Monday's Front Row.
• Story is a campaign for shorter stories. It's run by Book Trust, co-organisers of the awards.