Ingrid Persaud’s Debut Story Wins the BBC National Short Story Award

Trinidadian writer Ingrid Persaud’s short story “The Sweet Sop” has been chosen as the winner of this year’s BBC National Short Story Award, from an impressive all-female shortlist. Though she has published a novel, If I Never Went Home, “The Sweet Sop” is Persaud’s first-ever short story. It also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017. (If you’d like to know how a first short story could possibly be so good, you can read it for yourself at Granta.)

“Sentimentality is hard to write well,” judge Benjamin Markovits said in a press release. “There’s a temptation in fiction to make people colder and less loving than they really are, just to avoid it . . . “The Sweet Sop” gets the balance just right, the anger and humour and love. It’s a story about a guy who gets to know his father as he’s dying. He breaks through his dad’s reserve by bringing sweets, which they eat together, knowing that this is also a kind of betrayal of his mother, who raised him. It’s beautifully told, moving and natural—it takes enormous skill to tell a complex story so clearly.”

Persaud will be awarded £15,000 tonight by the 2018 Chair of Judges, Stig Abell, at a ceremony held at Cambridge University.