The short story just keeps trying to be saved

At the Edinburgh Book Festival, a new prize is trying to rejuvenate interest in the short story — and they hope it will attain the prestige of the Booker Prize:

The short story, once the stock in trade of world-famous writers such

as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allen Poe, has

languished in the shadow of the novel for the past decade.

Today, with the announcement at the Edinburgh International Book

Festival of the world’s largest award for a short story, plans are

afoot to put it back at the heart of the modern literary landscape.

In an attempt to rejuvenate the literary form, organisers of the

National Short Story Prize are offering £15,000 to the winner and

£3,000 for the runner-up in what they hope will become an annual event

of the size and prominence of the Man Booker Prize.

Funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the

Arts (Nesta) and supported by BBC Radio 4 and Prospect magazine, the

award aims to re-establish the importance of the short story after many

years of neglect. It is open to authors in the United Kingdom with a

previous record of publication.

Will the amount of lucre offered be enough to drum up interest? Obviously, time will tell, though lord knows it remains baffling why people don’t pay attention to short stories in the same way they do novels.

Related, John Rickards asks similar questions as pertaining to the mystery genre and the just-officially-launced Amazon Shorts initiative.