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Rebekah Staton and Hasan Dixon read Pieces by Manish Chauhan, the next of five stories shortlisted for this year's Â鶹Éç National Short Story Award with Cambridge University.

Originally from Leicester, Manish Chauhan works as a finance lawyer. He is a graduate of Creative Writing from the University of Oxford, and courses run by Curtis Brown Creative and The Stinging Fly. His work has been longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Award (2019) and shortlisted for the DGA First Novel Prize (2020), for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize (2021/2022), the Exeter Short Story Award (2019) and The Evesham Festival of Words Prize (2020).

The Â鶹Éç National Short Story Award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. The 2023 winner of the Â鶹Éç National Short Story Award was Naomi Wood who won for ‘Comorbidities’, a story examining the difficulty of maintaining love and intimacy in a marriage, from her debut collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (Orion). The 2024 winner will be announced live on Â鶹Éç Radio 4’s Front Row on Tuesday 1 October 2024.

All of the stories are available on Â鶹Éç Sounds where you can also download the Â鶹Éç National Short Story Award podcast which includes a Front Row interview with each of the five shortlisted writers.

Abridged by Julian Wilkinson
Produced by Justine Willett