BBC National Short Story Award - You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle by Colwill Brown

Download You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle by Colwill Brown

Colwill Brown's powerful and heart-breaking story is about Shaz, a teenager who is more vulnerable than she realises. A brutal incident with two boys has a lasting impact, leaving her with a powerful sense of shame, and curtailing her life chances. The reader is Sophie McShera.

Colwill Brown is the author of the novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh published in 2025. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prairie Schooner, and other publications, and she has received scholarships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Anderson Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere.

The annual BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University marks its twentieth anniversary in 2025 with a shortlist of five short stories by established and newer writers to the form. The five outstanding stories explore relationships, community and place against a backdrop of a world in crisis.

For two decades this award has celebrated writers who are the UK’s finest exponents of the form.  James Lasdun secured the inaugural Award in 2006 for ‘An Anxious Man’. In 2012 when the Award expanded internationally for one year, Miroslav Penkov was victorious for his story, ‘East of the West’. Last year, the Award was won by Ross Raisin for ‘Ghost Kitchen’, a tense, cinematic story narrated by a bicycle courier and inspired by the gig economy and the ‘dark kitchens’ of the restaurant industry.

In its 20-year history, Sarah Hall, K J Orr, Naomi Wood, Jonathan Buckley, Julian Gough, Clare Wigfall, Cynan Jones, Lucy Caldwell, Ingrid Persaud, Saba Sams and David Constantine have also carried off the Award with shortlisted authors including Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay, William Trevor, Rose Tremain, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Naomi Alderman, Kamila Shamsie, K Patrick and Jacqueline Crooks.

This year’s judging panel was chaired by Di Speirs who has sat on every judging panel since the Award’s inception and is joined by the very first chair of judges, William Boyd as well as former winners and shortlisted writers Lucy Caldwell, Ross Raisin and Kamila Shamsie.

In a time when literary awards come and go, and can struggle for funding and airtime, the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University continues to be a cause for joy

From 15th to 18th September four of the shortlisted stories can be heard at 3.30 each afternoon with the fifth story in contention for the award broadcasting on Friday, 19th September, at 11.30pm. The winner of the 20th BBC National Short Story Award will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Tuesday 30th September 2025.

If you have been a victim of child or adult sexual abuse or violence, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.

Produced by Elizabeth Allard.

Published on Saturday, 20th September 2025.

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