Birmingham, England November 1974. What else could go wrong? One person's tale of getting on with it. Winner of international short story award. Experimental project before publishing larger book. " On New Street definitely earns its first place. The story is stark and understated: flawless prose, with lines as polished as poetry." Crista Ermiya "Good writers observe the everyday. With something small and ordinary, an old shoe maybe, they allow themselves to be stupidly amazed, to just stand and gape, as Raymond Carver put it. Then they write, making something extraordinary out of that old shoe. Equally they take the extraordinary and make that into something everyday. It’s called skill. We judges are miners. We sometimes have to take a pick-axe and dig around for evidence of skill. Here though, the top three stories glowed with it and the winning story was just there, lying on the surface; a jewel. No digging required." Celia Bryce

Birmingham, England November 1974. What else could go wrong? One person's tale of getting on with it. Winner of international short story award. Experimental project before publishing larger book. " On New Street definitely earns its first place. The story is stark and understated: flawless prose, with lines as polished as poetry." Crista Ermiya "Good writers observe the everyday. With something small and ordinary, an old shoe maybe, they allow themselves to be stupidly amazed, to just stand and gape, as Raymond Carver put it. Then they write, making something extraordinary out of that old shoe. Equally they take the extraordinary and make that into something everyday. It’s called skill. We judges are miners. We sometimes have to take a pick-axe and dig around for evidence of skill. Here though, the top three stories glowed with it and the winning story was just there, lying on the surface; a jewel. No digging required." Celia Bryce