One of the great strengths of The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the quality and experience of its judging panels which have featured an array of outstanding writers.
Andrew Holgate has been the Literary Editor of The Sunday Times since 2008. Amongst many other prizes and awards, he has previously been a judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize, the Somerset Maugham Awards and the Betty Trask Prize. He is also a member of the Folio Prize Academy.
Matthew Evans is the Award’s non-voting Chair of Judges. Lord Evans CBE is the former Chairman of EFG Private Bank. Prior to joining EFG, Lord Evans was a junior government minister in the House of Lords, Chairman of Faber & Faber and Vice Chairman of the British Film Institute. He is also President of the British Antique Dealers’ Association.
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Hanif Kureishi is a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, short story writer and director. His first novel, published in 1990, was the semi-autobiographical The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread Award in the same year. His first collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, focuses on a series of characters working in the media, and his other works include the novella Intimacy and Gabriel’s Gift, published in 2001. His screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette earned him an Oscar nomination and in 2007 he was awarded a CBE for his services to literature.
A S Byatt is internationally renowned as a novelist and short-story writer. She won the Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel Possession, and her latest, The Children’s Book, was shortlisted in 2009. She has herself been a judge for both the Booker Prize and the Betty Trask Award. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she was Senior Lecturer in English at University College London before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
Renowned interviewer Lynn Barber recently joined The Sunday Times Magazine. Her books include How to Improve Your Man in Bed and The Heyday of Natural History, and she sat on the judging panel for the 2006 Turner Prize. Her autobiography An Education received high praise when first published in Granta magazine and has been released as a film by the BBC this month.
The author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, How to Be Good and About A Boy, Nick Hornby is one of the UK’s most popular novelists and short story writers. His novels have been adapted for both stage and screen and Nick has recently scripted the adaptation of fellow judge Lynn Barber's memoir An Education. Starting out as a journalist with features published in The Sunday Times, Esquire, Vogue, and Time, he is now widely respected as a prolific essayist on music and popular culture. His latest novel, Juliet, Naked, was published in September and is about rock stars, relationships and last chances.