The richly imaginative winning entries of Bazaar’s annual creative-writing contest introduce a clutch of brilliant new literary voices
The theme for this year’s short-story competition, held in association with Montblanc, was ‘the experiment’, which gave rise to highly original narratives. As a result, the judges – Bazaar’s Lydia Slater, Helena Lee and Erica Wagner, the authors Maggie O’Farrell and Kaliane Bradley, the super-agent Caroline Michel from PFD and Montblanc’s brand director Georgia Noutsi – were entertained, moved and impressed by the calibre of the submissions. The top accolade was unanimously awarded to Stephanie Y Tam for her powerful and elegant tale ‘Bird Bones’, exploring the silence between intergenerational relationships, which Bradley described as ‘exquisitely considered, flawlessly balanced and astonishingly confident’. O’Farrell called it ‘a beautifully assured and heart-rending story, with an arresting voice, about the desire to remember and the need to forget’, while Michel praised its ‘ambition’. As Wagner observed, ‘It’s a reminder of what can be achieved in the space of a short story.’ Tam wins a Montblanc Meisterstück 149 pen, which celebrates its centenary this year, as well as a two-night stay at Chewton Glen in Hampshire. Her story is published here, along with the three runners-up: ‘Limerence’ by Sam Rennie, ‘Acacia’ by Sabrina Wolfe and ‘Pacificadora’ by Philippa Howell.
Bird Bones
It began with the sparrows. Remember this: they were the first warning.
For ten years after the war, we lived in a red state of fantasy.
In the eleventh year, a word came from Beijing.
Sparrows, the Chairman declared, are the public animals of capitalism! They eat what they do not earn; they steal from hardworking peasants. They bring disease and disaster.
Down with the birds, down with the pests!
The Great Experiment was launched. Throughout the countryside, peasants rose up and shot the little creatures out of the sky. The air thickened with the frenzy of wings. When the birds landed on the great banyan tree that sheltered your great-grandmother’s grave, our neighbours beat gongs and pans until they fell out of the branches. When the avian refugees fled to foreign embassies, our mothers, fathers and grandparents circled the perimeters and pounded drums. By the end of the second day, the embassy workers had to remove the feathered corpses by the shovelful. It was the first time we learned that a thing with wings could drop dead of exhaustion.
Nowhere to fly, nowhere to land.
The air hung with a heavy stillness. Then, at the end of two years, a low vibration rose from the earth. Locusts. With no birds to keep the insects in check, their hungry, clicking mouths devoured swathes of farmland, down to the very rice straw t
