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Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel and Susan Hill are among the writers longlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011.
Alongside the better-known authors, the longlist, which also features Michel Faber and Tibor Fischer, includes former bus conductor Fabian Ackler and actor and puppeteer Erin Soros. The prize is open to authors of previously unpublished work or stories first published after 1st January 2010. The shortlist will be announced on 13th March and the winner revealed at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on 8th April. Each shortlisted author will receive £500.
Judge A S Byatt said: "The stories we read this year were both varied and well crafted. We had considerable difficulty in narrowing the list to 20 . . . We have the fantastic and the precisely real, the shocking and the witty, the distressing and the invigorating. We have stories by famous writers and stories by the unknown. Some are succinct and some are elegiac. All were debated with passion."
The judges are author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, journalist and author Daisy Waugh, writer and journalist Will Self, Byatt and Andrew Holgate, literary editor of the Sunday Times. The non-voting judges' chairman is Matthew Evans, chairman of EFG Private Bank and former chairman of Faber & Faber.
The 20 long-listed writers and the titles of their short stories are: