Winner of the BBC National Short Story Awards 2025!
Colwill Brown has won the twentieth anniversary BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University (NSSA) for ‘You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle’, a ‘tense’ and ‘increasingly heartbreaking’ story exploring the long term effects of trauma told in ‘energetic’ South Yorkshire dialect.
Colwill was announced as the winner of the £15,000 prize at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House and broadcast live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. You can listen to ‘You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle’, read by Sophie McShera, here.
The ceremony also saw Rebecca Smith awarded as the winner of the Young Writers’ Award. Her story, ‘Scouse’s Run’, is available to listen to here.
The BBC National Short Story Award, now in its twentieth year, is one of the most prestigious and the best rewarded for a single short story and celebrates the best in home-grown short fiction.
Praised for its ‘startling prose’ and ‘astonishing’ voice, ‘You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle’ is the story of a teenager, Shaz, who endures a life-changing incident with two boys, one of whom is her friend’s boyfriend. Set in a small community, the story explores the power of shame and its lasting impact, as Shaz keeps silent into adulthood, while those around her move on with their lives. Written in the second person and told in the Doncaster dialect of Brown’s childhood, the story reflects the music and poetry of South Yorkshire while carrying a powerful message about how the repercussions of events can shape our future.
Di Speirs MBE, Chair of the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award Judging Panel, says:
“From first reading, Colwill Brown’s story leapt from the page, alive and immediately compelling, deeply disturbing, a story we couldn’t forget. The brio of the dialect, the brilliance of both the second person narration and the handling of the passage of time, and above all the exploration of a life critically damaged in a moment, all made this our unanimous winner.”
Talking about her story, Brown says:
“The story was inspired by memories of growing up in Doncaster in the late nineties and early noughties, based on my sense of the atmosphere at that time, what it was like to be a teenager, in particular what it was like to be a girl. I admire so many of the writers who have appeared on the [BBC NSSA] list; it’s a real honour to have a story of mine in company with theirs.”
Colwill’s debut novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, from which the short story is taken, was published earlier this year by Chatto & Windus, Vintage.
The other shortlisted writers were Booker Prize 2025 longlisted author Andrew Miller; multi-award winning Irish writer Caoilinn Hughes, Desmond Elliott Prize winning novelist and short story specialist Edward Hogan; and British-Lebanese author Emily Abdeni-Holman. You can listen to all of their stories here.
About the BBC National Short Story Awards with Cambridge University
The BBC National Short Story Award, now in its twentieth year, is one of the most prestigious and the best rewarded for a single short story and celebrates the best in home-grown short fiction. The ambition of the award is to expand opportunities for British writers, readers and publishers of the short story, and to honour the UK’s finest exponents of the form. Keep an eye on the website for submission details for the 2026 Award.
