Yiyun Li wins Sunday Times short story prize for A Sheltered Woman
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Version 0 of 1. The “mastery” of Yiyun Li’s tale about a Chinese-American nanny caring for a troubled mother and her newborn baby has made her the first woman to win the Sunday Times EFG short story prize. Li’s story, A Sheltered Woman, took the £30,000 award on Friday evening. First published in the New Yorker in March 2014, it tells of Auntie Mei, nanny to a new baby whose mother says she is suffering from postpartum depression. Novelist Elif Shafak, on the judging panel for the award, praised the “diverse and dazzling” shortlist, but said that A Sheltered Woman “enchanted” judges “with its exquisite crafting, brilliant observations and modest but powerful voice”. Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate added that while “the calibre of the entire shortlist was exceptional … the mastery displayed by Yiyun Li in her chillingly cool and insightful story left little doubt she should be the winner”. The novelist, who grew up in Beijing, said that a similar experience of her own had inspired the story Near the start of the story, Auntie Mei recounts how she has recorded the details of the 131 babies she has cared for in a small notebook she bought years ago in a garage sale in Illinois. “She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents,” writes Li. “When she handed a dime to the child with the cashbox on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no. It was greed that had made her ask, but when the memory came back – it often did when she took the notebook out of her suitcase for another interview – Auntie Mei would laugh at herself: why on earth had she wanted two notebooks, when there’s not enough life to fill one?” The novelist, who grew up in Beijing and moved to the US in 1996, said that a similar experience of her own had inspired the story. “A couple years of ago, while rummaging through old things, I found a notebook that I had bought at a garage sale in Iowa City when I first came to America – I had paid five cents for it. The notebook was in a good shape; though it remained unused,” she said. “A character occurred to me: she paid a dime and asked if there was a second notebook so she did not have to have the change back. Such greed, the character said, laughing at herself. From that moment on I knew I had a story.” Li, who became a US citizen in 2012, won the Guardian first book award in 2006 with her first collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Previous winners of the Sunday Times award include Junot Díaz, Anthony Doerr and last year’s winner, Adam Johnson. |