Willesden Herald Competition Stunner

If you are one of the 800 entrants for the 2008 Willesden Herald Short Story Competition, well, better luck next year. The £5000 prize judged by Zadie Smith will not be awarded this year because organisers and Ms Smith, er, judged - that none of the stories was good enough.

Extract from Zadie Smith's statement
For I have thought, reading through these entries, that maybe the problem with this prize is that my name is attached to it. To be very clear: just because this prize has the words Willesden and Zadie hovering by it, does not mean that I or the other judges want to read hundreds of jolly stories of multicultural life on the streets of North London. Nor are we exclusively interested in cutesy American comedies, or self-referential post-modern vignettes, or college satires. To be even clearer: if these things turn up and are brilliantly written, they will not be ignored. But we also welcome all those whose literary sympathies lie with Rimbaud or Capote, with Irving Rosenthal or Proust, with Svevo or Trocchi, with Ballard or Bellow, Denis Cooper or Diderot, with Coetzee or Patricia Highsmith, with street punks or Elizabethans, with Southern Gothic or with Nordic Crime, with Brutalists or Realists, with the Lyrical or the Encyclopedic, in the ivory tower, or amongst the trash that catches in the gutter. We welcome everybody. We have only one principle here: MAKE IT GOOD. So, let’s try again, yes?

And no doubt many will "try again", for the chance to be judged 'good enough' by Zadie Smith. For now, they're just stunned at the news, a real anti-climax to the competition whose winner would have collected the prize this month, as well as a real boost to their writing careers. There is speculation about the existence of a shortlist, but not even that has been made public thus far. Dissapointed writers have been leaving comments on the Willesden Herald blog. An update has also been posted on the site.

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Update: Wednesday 6th February 2008

With the furore that greeted the decision not to award a prize to any of the entries (we now know there were 850 short stories from all over the world) and the non-publication of the shortlist, the organisers have now released their last word on the matter. They decided, after all, to publish the 'shortlist' of 10 writers, and to share the cash prize £500 apiece between them. But first,they had to go and check that the shortlisters were cool with this, given the negative reactions to yesterday's announcement. Meanwhile, some speculated as to whether those shortlisted would wish to be forever known as writers whose stories were so "mediocre" that no top prize could be considered. We now know the answer: the 'shortlisted' writers did not want the 'honour'; in the main, they said NO to both publication and £500 cash.

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From the Willesden Herald update

In response to the negative comments left about the decision not to award the prize, Zadie Smith decided that the money should be split, to help counter the suggestions that the short-listed writers were somehow ‘mediocre’. There was no intention at all of suggesting such a thing and any close reading of Zadie’s statement will show this to be false. Being the best out of 850 entries is no small feat.

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It is worth mentioning that there are two standards here that we can look to:

• to be the best of a batch; and

• to be worthy of first place in a competition which celebrates outright excellence.

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The latter is a much higher aspiration than the former; however, the former is something to be proud of.

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When the decision was made to split the prize money, the short-listed writers were contacted again and most of them said that they did not want their names or stories to appear and did not want any prize money. They told us to fuck off. Which is fair enough.

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In conclusion, many writers agree that if the organisers did not consider any of the stories worthy of the not inconsiderable cash prize, they had every right not to award it. Some, however, have issues with the handling of the result's announcement.

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Update: Thursday 7th February

More on the fallout from the Willesden Herald's own 'Super Tuesday' - and the writer Kay Sexton has revealed herself as one of the "infamous 10" who were "not good enough" for Zadie Smith.

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"My story and I still think we’re 'good enough'" - she insists.

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"I'm old and egotistical enough to have confidence in my own opinion, rather than Zadie's."

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Hear hear.

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Yet another update - Thursday 7th PM

The unawarded prize money will be donated to charity. And there's talk of the competition being wound up. Should that happen, this year's fiasco would have been the death knell...

• The Guardian Book Blog.