6:54 AM 1st October 2025
Rising Star Colwill Brown Wins 20th Anniversary BBC National Short Story Award
Colwill Brown
Photo: Kathryn Widdowson©
Brown was presented with the prize of £15,000 this evening (Tuesday 30 September) by the 2025 Chair of Judges Di Speirs at a ceremony held at BBC Brhioadcasting House and broadcast live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. You Cannot Thead a Moving Needle is available to listen to on BBC Sounds read by Sophie McShera.
Praised for its ‘startling prose’ and ‘astonishing’ voice, You Cannot Thead a Moving Needle is the story of a teenager, Shaz, whose life is changed forever after a brutal incident with two boys, one of them the boyfriend of her best friend. Set in a small community, the story explores the power of shame and its lasting impact, as Shaz keeps silent into adulthood, while her assailants move on with their lives, unaffected. 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 traumatic events in our formative years can shape our future.
“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.”
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.
Brown, whose debut novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh was published earlier this year by Vintage, beat a strong shortlist including Costa Book of the Year 2011 and Booker Prize 2025 shortlisted 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.
“Colwill Brown’s Yorkshire-dialect story is a fast, taut examination of repercussions. One messy, half-remembered night in a young woman’s life echos down the years in bouts of rage and shame, in the need for silence to protect friends and the struggle to find a way to live among dwindling opportunities when the same people still wander the same streets each day. This year’s winning story demonstrates how seemingly small events can shape our futures, how the thoughtlessness of youth can shadow our adult choices. All of this is done in deft, startling prose that opens new possibilities in contemporary literary voice. Congratulations Colwill!”
Marking the award’s 20th anniversary, Di Speirs, who has judged the BBC National Short Story Award since its launch, is joined by a distinguished panel of returning judges, bestselling novelist William Boyd, who judged the inaugural award in 2006, and previous NSSA winners Lucy Caldwell and Ross Raisin, and previous shortlistee Kamila Shamsie who served as judges in 2020, 2012 and 2010 respectively.
Alongside BBC NSSA, the winner of the 2025 BBC Young Writer’s Award with Cambridge University, an award created to inspire and encourage the next generation of short story writers, was also announced.
Rebecca Smith