Arifa Akbar is Literary Editor of The Independent and inewspapers. She was a judge for the Orwell Prize in 2013, the Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014 and is on the judging panel for the current . The literary prize, which is open for entries until 31 August, offers an opportunity for established and emerging poets and fiction writers to connect with a wider, international audience with prizes including publication. We speak to Arifa about what makes a short story captivating.
A: What is your perspective on the short story as a medium?
AA: I think it offers the greatest possibilities for novelty and experimentalism. But I suspect it is also the form that is the hardest to master: it might be easier to write a good novel than to write a good short story because an author has to grip and move the reader in a far shorter space of time.
A: Why do you think people choose to write short fiction?
AA: New writers might consider it a good starting point for its brevity and its flexibility – so it might help them find a voice, or play with voices. Experienced writers might choose it for its formal challenges – they must create a world as complete and as believable as any in long fiction, but in a fraction of the word count. I think short story writers like the form because it also offers such flexibility: a short story can be a paragraph or 40 pages; it can contain just one moment or a lifetime. There is such a lot of potential in its range.
A: You have chaired author interviews at Asia House and the South Asian Literary Festival. Which author interviews have been your highlights and which authors have you enjoyed speaking to?
AA: I really enjoyed speaking to Anita Anand earlier this year about her book, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, which is a biography on an Indian Suffragette and a kind of hidden history because most of us didn’t know of Sophia Duleep Singh until Anita Anand’s book was published.
As well as being a well researched and absorbing dynastic family history, Sophia’s life story and struggles also have a contemporary resonance, in the light of the fourth – or fifth – wave feminism that we are seeing now. I also liked speaking to Kamila Shamsie last year about her Orange-shortlisted book, A God in Every Stone, which is fiction with a strong, independently-minded woman at its heart.
A: What did you notice about last year’s short fiction entries in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award?
AA: A sense of daring – entrants seemed to be playing with form and structure in original and fresh ways and there was such variety in subject matter.
A: What makes a short story stick out for you?
AA: A variety of things: emotional depth or resonance. The sense that this is a glimpse, however brief, into a world that is much larger, and a character that is much more complex, than the bounds of the story. An originality of form – so something new and exciting in the way a story is told.
The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award is now open for entries. Register by 31 August at
Credits
1. Agne Stasiauskaite,  µþ¾±²ú±ô¾±´Ç²µ°ù²¹±è³ó²â.ÌýFrom the Aesthetica Art Prize 2014.
