SHORT & SHARP
For Bazaar’s 10th annual creative-writing competition, the theme ‘Notes’ inspired hundreds of enticing submissions, in which we found wordplay, wisdom and wry humour. The challenge of choosing a winner was taken up by this year’s judging panel, which comprised Bazaar’s editor-in-chief Lydia Slater, features director Helena Lee and contributing literary editor Erica Wagner, along with the author Diana Evans, Virago’s chair Lennie Goodings and Caroline Michel from the literary agency PFD. After lunch and spirited debate at Claridge’s, Ally Cornish was given the top accolade for her tale about male ego and a wife regaining her agency; Michel praised ‘that wonderful joy of a complete story, whose characters flew off the page with wit and ease’. Cornish wins a stay at one of Callow Hall’s magical treehouses; her story is published here, along with those by the runners-up, Amanda Huggins and Youmna Chamieh.
The Archivist By Ally Cornish
Marina found the missing certificate at the back of the top drawer of Robert’s writing bureau. ‘The University of Bridgetown, Nebraska: author in residence 1983.’ As career footprints went, it was somewhat feeble, but Robert had insisted she locate it. No point building an incomplete archive, he said. You never know what a student of the future might find illuminating. She opened the box marked ‘1980-85’ and filed the sheet of paper, glancing at her watch and feeling a twinge of anxiety. The archivist was due in an hour and Robert would soon be demanding his lunch and medication.
It had been Robert’s idea to donate his ‘archive’ – a rather grandiose term, she thought, for his manuscripts, letters and other accumulated flimflam – to a university. ‘To be opened after my death,’ he always said when recounting the plan to others – in his mind, his death was clearly going to be a rather less run-of-the-mill kind of ending.
Marina had been somewhat taken aback when the gracious acceptance note from Yale had arrived less than a week after Robert’s agent had sent the proposal. Robert, naturally, was unsurprised. ‘They took Salman’s,’ he said, approvingly. ‘And Ian’s, of course. It’s good to be in America. And Yale’s literature faculty is second to none.’
Of course, it made sense. It would be a natural conclusion to Robert’s gilded career: the early critical acclaim, the literary awards (though never the Booker, a slight that he regularly re-examined). And then the mid-career explosion with Only Connect and its Oscar-laden Hollywood adaptation, which brought the kind of household fame rarely bestowed on literary novelists. And how very much Robert had enjoyed that fame. Talk shows, festivals, award ceremonies: during the year
