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Guy Le Jeune's Small Town Removal shortlisted for Costa story award

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Costa countdown thumb

Costa countdown

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.

It’s a long wait from 7 September to 24 January, as OCA creative writing student Guy Le Jeune has discovered.  His short story, ‘Small Town Removal’, was one of six from over 1,800 entries to make the shortlist for the Costa Short Story Award, which was launched last year.  Today, Costa revealed the identities of the six short-listed writers: Guy, and Avril Joy, Sheila Llewellyn, Chioma Okereke, Angela Readman and Salley Vickers.
The waiting isn’t over yet though, as the name of the winner and two runners-up won’t be announced until next week, at the Costa Book Awards Ceremony in London next Tuesday, 29 January. The Costa Short Story Award winner will receive a prize of £3,500 and the two runners-up £750 each.
The award is for an unpublished short story of up to 4,000 words by an author aged 18 years or over and written in English. All entries were judged anonymously, without the identity of the author being available to the judges.  Richard Beard, Director of the National Academy of Writing, chaired the judging panel. His fellow judges were Fanny Blake, Victoria Hislop, Gary Kemp and Simon Trewin. Members of the public were then invited to vote online for their favourite story from the six finalists. 
Guy started writing two years ago after a long career in theatre.  He was commended in the Sean O’Faolain Prize in 2011 and shortlisted for the 2012 Fish Publishing Short Story Prize.  ‘Small Town Removal’ follows Michael Sweeney as he returns to the town where he grew up for the funeral of his estranged father.   For  a short while, Guy has more important things on his mind than writing: digging out his black tie and getting spruced up for a big night out in London – and more waiting.
It was a day last summer. My wife and I had just walked the dog around Lough Garadice in County Leitrim. We have a cottage close by and I spend a lot of time there. The sun was unusually hot and as we drove back into town we decided to stop at a pub, sit down on the bench outside and have a bottle of cider to cool us down
We decided on Jackie’s bar; they had some tables outside and we wanted to catch the last of the sun. As we sat and chatted and the dog dried off in the sun, the quiet of the afternoon was broken by a blast of bagpipes from across the street. I had seen a van pull up and the kilt-wearing driver get out, but I hadn’t really taken too much notice.
An entire scene then unfolded. A removal. In Catholic Ireland it is the service the night before the funeral, when the body is brought to the church to rest overnight.
I started making mental notes of the afternoon and scribbled them down when we got back to the cottage, thinking the experience would make an interesting blog post.
I wrote the experience in the first person but after seeing the piece on the page I realised there was short story in between the lines I’d written. I had seen that the Costa Book Awards had a new short story competition. It would be a prestigious prize among so many short story competitions so I decided to write the removal in the third person with a fictional character and a back-story.       After several drafts I filled out the Costa entry form, attached Small Town Removal, clicked submit and waited.
I’ve entered a few competitions now and I have had a couple of honourable mentions as well as a few where I didn’t hear a thing.  The process is fraught with worry, self-doubt and the emptiness between submission and results.
The Costa competition was a little different to most. There would be five judges who would look at a longlist of sixty stories and choose a shortlist of six. The shortlisted would then be posted anonymously on the Costa Book Awards website and the public would be able to download them and vote for their favourite. The story would be judged by its content and not by the author’s reputation and although that is the case with pretty much all competitions, the addition of the public vote was interesting.
Social media has entered most of our lives and my preference is Twitter, so prior to the announcement date I started to check the Twitter feeds of the judges. The announcement was due to be made at the end of November but a week before the date, the judges were tweeting that they had made their decision.
An anxious wait ensued, with many of my fellow Twitter writers speculating about the shortlist… 1800 entries, 60 on the longlist… Who decides? When will we hear? Has anybody heard anything?
Then came a very simple email, telling me I was on the shortlist and dire warnings about me breaching the anonymity rules. The last two months have been really tough. I’ve had to keep my identity secret and bite my tongue every time I saw a blog post or tweet about the Costa… and yes I did look… every day.
Well now the secret is out and I can finally celebrate… even if I don’t win, I am still delighted to be shortlisted, though my nerves may never be the same again. Next year I’m going to try base jumping or swimming with sharks as they are much more relaxing I’m sure…
You can find me at guylejeune.com or on Twitter @GuyLeJeune
 
photo credit: epSos.de via photopin cc
 


Posted by author: Elizabeth Underwood

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