Kingston University has endowed a new short fiction prize, worth £3,000 to the winner. As it’s called The Kingston Writing School Hilary Mantel short story competition, I was unsurprised, if honoured, to be asked to judge the final round. Reading the longlist was a bracing experience. Of the first five stories I picked up, four contained a suicide. The quality, however, was cheering and I selected three finalists.

Annemarie Neary is a London-based lawyer and a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. She has published a novel, A Parachute in the Lime Tree, set in Ireland in 1941. She has a master’s degree in art history, specialising in Venetian art of the Renaissance. Venice seems a long way from the sombre setting of her story One Day in Sarajevo, but no doubt her experience there has sharpened her eye for the process by which history is made over into tourist spectacle.

Rick Williams’s What Lies Beneath is a deceptively simple story about the varying fortunes of a group of old friends over a number of years. I think it was the great master of the form, William Trevor, who said that the short story is “the art of the glimpse”; his statement has become canonical and, in lesser hands, an excuse for lack of ambition. In skilled hands, a short story can be as capacious as a novel or film, as indeed many of Trevor’s are. Rick Williams, a London‑based subeditor, is a craftsman who knows how to chisel away to find the essentials. His technique is perfectly judged.

Michelle Cahill is a prizewinning Australian poet who has published a number of collections. Her story exhibits a poet’s economy in cutting to the heart of a time and place. Her deftness and linguistic grace masks her purpose, till she reveals a shocking glimpse of the price that art can exact.

The winner will be announced on Friday.