Winner of the BBC National Short Story Awards 2026!
Cherise Saywell announced as winner of 21st BBC National Short Story Awards with the University of Cambridge.
Cherise Saywell has won the 21st BBC National Short Story Award with the University of Cambridge (NSSA) for ‘Ditto’ an ‘assured’ and ‘beautifully crafted’ story about a child’s conflicting loyalties and moment of bravery when violence erupts in his house. Saywell was previously shortlisted for the Award in 2023.
Saywell was announced as the winner of the £15,000 prize at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House and broadcast live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. You can listen to ‘Ditto, read by Richard Goulding, here.
Praised for handling a child’s understanding of a complex adult world with ‘precision’ and ‘delicacy,’ ‘Ditto’ captures the evening when a young boy, nicknamed Ditto, like his father, finally overcomes indecision and conflicing loyalties to stand up for his mother and call the police to report a disturbance at home. The story is set in a small, insular Australian town, inspired by the place where Saywell grew up, at a time when the public phone box – which Ditto uses to call the police – was many people’s only way of connecting with the wider world. This ‘beautifully crafted’ story explores masculinity, domestic abuse and its effect on children who are too young to articulate what they are experiencing with ‘empathy’ and ‘tension.’ Despite dark themes, the story, at its heart, is one of ‘hope and salvation.’
Di Speirs MBE, Chair of the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award Judging Panel, says:
“One of the hardest things to do in fiction is to convey with precision and delicacy a child's understanding. In ‘Ditto’, Cherise Saywell achieves this with quiet grace, capturing the moment when a young boy, surviving as well as he can in an adult world demanding conflicting loyalties, has to assume a responsibility he hasn't sought. Taut and beautifully crafted, tender and deeply rooted in one dusk evening and one small town, Saywell’s story writing is assured and true and we are absolutely delighted that ‘Ditto’ is this year's winner.”
Talking about her story, Saywell says:
“I wanted to find a way to write about how children experience violence, when they have no words for the things they are experiencing… They feel love and fear and responsibility all at the same time, but have no name for what’s happening around them.”
Saywell beat a strong all-female shortlist including multi-award-winning Irish writer Caoilinn Hughes, 2021 BBC NSSA winner and five-time shortlistee Lucy Caldwell, biographer, playwright and novelist, Laura Beatty, and Merryn Glover, a Kathmandu-born Australian writer who lives in Scotland. You can listen to all of their stories here.
About the BBC National Short Story Awards with Cambridge University
The BBC National Short Story Award, now in its twenty-first year, is one of the most prestigious and the best rewarded for a single short story and celebrates the best in home-grown short fiction. The ambition of the award is to expand opportunities for British writers, readers and publishers of the short story, and to honour the UK’s finest exponents of the form. Keep an eye on the website for submission details for the 2027 Award.
