Eley Williams | |
---|---|
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Writer |
Notable work | Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) The Liar's Dictionary (2021) |
Awards | Republic of Consciousness Prize James Tait Black Memorial Prize |
Eley Williams FRSL is a British writer. [1] Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize [2] and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. [3] With writing anthologised in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story (Penguin Classics, 2018), [4] Liberating the Canon (Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2018) [5] and Not Here: A Queer Anthology of Loneliness (Pilot Press, 2017), [6] she is an alumna of the MacDowell workshop and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [7] She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London, [8] and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry. [9]
Her first novel, The Liar's Dictionary, was published in 2020, described in The Guardian as a "virtuoso performance full of charm... a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us." [10] Stuart Kelly in a review in The Spectator wrote of the book: "It deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name (done neither stridently nor sentimentally). It is, in short, a delight." [11]
Williams' stories "Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good" (2018) and "Moonlighting" (2019) have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 under the Short Works strand, and her story "Scrimshaw" was a finalist for the 2020 BBC National Short Story Award. [12] A 10-part radio series Gambits, based around the theme of chess, was broadcast on Radio 4 beginning in November 2021. [13]
In 2017, Williams received the Society of Authors's Writing Grant, and in 2018, she received a MacDowell Fellowship and Fellowship of Royal Society of Literature. [8]
In 2023, Williams was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, compiled every 10 years since 1983, identifying the 20 most significant British novelists aged under 40. [14] [15]
Year | Title | Award | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
2005 | "Gravity" | Christopher Tower Poetry Prize | Winner | [16] |
2017 | Attrib. and Other Stories | James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction | Winner | [3] [17] |
2018 | Dylan Thomas Prize | Longlist | [18] | |
Republic of Consciousness Prize | Winner | [2] [19] | ||
2020 | "Scrimshaw" | BBC National Short Story Award | Finalist | [12] |
2021 | The Liar’s Dictionary | Betty Trask Award | Winner | [20] |
Desmond Elliott Prize | Shortlist | [21] |
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