New Voices: The Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize 2018

Writers shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize read their shortlisted stories

Collected here are the six best stories chosen by the judging panel of the Guardian 4th Estate BAME short story prize 2018.

In them you’ll encounter a range of lives and situations: an armless swimmer representing Cultural Revolution China in the Paralympic Games; an encounter between a young girl and a misanthropic B&B owner in the wake of the Grenfell tower fire; a schoolgirl helping her grandmother in a Chinese take-away in Hull; the residents of a street united by a piano; a historic town in China invaded by a powerful stench; and a teenage girl struggling with her gender in a small town steeped in folklore.

Read here by the writers themselves, these stories will move, entertain and surprise you – and give a tantalising taste of the future work we might expect from these talented writers.

About the author

Yiming Ma is a Chinese-Canadian writer and recent graduate of Stanford University. His story ‘Swimmer of Yangtze’ was shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and 2018 LitMag Virginia Woolf Award.

Kit Fan is a poet and fiction writer. In 2018, he won a Northern Writers’ Award for Diamond Hill, a novel-in-progress. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize.

Jason Deelchand is a secondary-school teacher based in Bristol. He has studied in Bath and Exeter.

Savannah Burney has worked at the World Health Organisation and in the charity sector and is currently studying for a Postgraduate Diploma in Social Work.

Gurnaik Johal was born in West London and studies English Literature with Creative Writing at The University of Manchester.

Varaidzo is a writer and editor based in London.She has been published in the Guardian and award-winning anthology, The Good Immigrant, amongst others. She is currently an assistant editor at Wasafiri.