Welsh writer Cynan Jones’s “perfect” and “terrifying” tale of a man lost at sea, The Edge of the Shoal, has won the £15,000 BBC national short story award.
Jones’s entry was announced as the winner of the award on Tuesday evening, beating stories by authors including Helen Oyeyemi and Jenni Fagan. It tells of a man who sets out to scatter his father’s ashes from a kayak, leaving a note for his pregnant partner: “Pick salad x.” He is caught up in a storm and finds himself injured, adrift and struggling to survive.
“He feels a confusion, a kind of throb in his head. There is a complete horizon. A horizon everywhere around and no point of it seems closer than another. It brings claustrophobia. He does not know if he’s moving – if he’s travelling. He cannot tell in which direction if he is,” writes Jones. “He feels only the rock, the sway, the dip and wallow of the boat.”
Eimear McBride, Baileys prize-winning author and one of the award judges, called it “as perfect a short story as I’ve ever read” and a “tenderly devastating exploration of the body as it hangs outside time … I’ve thought about The Edge of the Shoal most days since first reading it, months ago.”
Her fellow judge, Man Booker longlistee Jon McGregor said that Jones’s story “does something genuinely thrilling with the confines of the short story: for 6,000 words the reader exists only in the lived present moment, in a mental space where life is stripped to its bare essentials. There is no space here for recollection or speculation, no rueful observation or commentary. There are simply the raw bleeding details of survival. It’s an exhilarating, terrifying and life-affirming read.”
Jones, who has previously won a Betty Trask award, the Wales Book of the Year fiction prize and a Jerwood fiction prize, was presented with the award by chair of judges, author Joanna Trollope. The author, who was born and lives near Aberaeron on the west coast of Wales, said that The Edge of the Shoal had its roots in his own experiences of the sea. “And then I wanted to set myself a challenge, to strip away all the things which in my novels people say I do well, so I would have to use my instincts.”
His story of the man in the kayak began life as a novel of 30,000 words, “but it wouldn’t work”. Jones compressed it to become the shorter novella, Cove, and then received a phone call from the New Yorker saying they would publish it if he could cut it in half in four days. “That was an amazing experience, distilling an already compressed story into 6,000 words,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written... It was brutal.”
Jones described himself as “a writer of short novels”, but said that he was finding “that act of compression in the short story increasingly fascinating”. Winning the the award would, he said, “give me the time to write”. “As a writer, I’m a mix of very confident and zero confidence - hypercritical, nothing’s good enough, but still weirdly confident enough to be able to send a story to someone to read,” he said. “At some stage, it’s that sporting metaphor: you have to trust the talent. You have to believe you can write.”
