Five extraordinary stories shortlisted for the 2023 Florence Staniforth Student Fiction Prize

The College has a strong tradition of supporting and celebrating creative writers with the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize being testament to this. It is now celebrating its 12th successful year and released its shortlist of authors for the 2023 prize on the 3rd of May. The College has several prizes for its own students too, like the Florence Staniforth Student Fiction Prize.

Funded by the Florence Staniforth Award for Excellence in Creative Writing, the prize is for students from any discipline studying at Lucy Cavendish College. Students are invited to submit a short story to a panel of judges led by Director of Studies in English Dr Alex Freer. Also on the panel are Fellow Emerita Dr Isobel Maddison, published authors and creative writing teachers Miranda Doyle and Lizzie Speller, and author and scholar Padma Viswanathan.

The five shortlisted students are:

• Fran Brosan - Drip Feed

Fran Brosan studied English Literature at the University of Durham.  She went on to a career in advertising before starting her own international communications agency, Omobono, which she sold to Horizon Capital in 2021.   Fran is in her second year of a MSt in Creative Writing.  She lives in Norfolk and runs to keep herself sane.

• Aidan Gray - The Sentry

Aidan Gray is a 2nd year Classics PhD originally from Maryland in the USA. His poetry has been showcased in the Cambridge Botanical Gardens and in Regent’s University, London. He also acts in and directs plays at Cambridge, and occasionally does dramatic readings of ghost stories.

• Lily Laycock - Changeling

Lily is a writer and artist from Australia in their final year of the Creative Writing MSt at Cambridge. Their poetry and short stories have been featured in Andromeda Spaceways and Farrago, and they have been nominated on Ellen Datlow’s list of Best Horror. In their spare time, they wander the woods and collect potentially poisonous berries. They are currently optioning their first novel for publication.  

• Susan Hatters-Friedman - Tangled Roots

Susan Hatters Friedman, MD, is working toward her MSt in Crime and Thriller Writing at the University of Cambridge. Susan is a psychiatrist specializing in forensic psychiatry and maternal mental health. An avid reader of mysteries since she was a young girl, her passion led to her career in forensic psychiatry. Now that her children are grown and living their best lives around the world, she has turned to her dream of writing mysteries herself. She has also studied satire writing with the Second City in the US, and playwriting with Gary Henderson when she lived in New Zealand. Her recent creative writing can be read in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and Drunk Monkeys.

• Anna-Theresa Münt - The Unravelling

Anna-Theresa Münt is a history undergraduate student in her third and final year at Lucy Cavendish, which is an absolutely terrifying prospect for her. Her love for stories goes back further than her memory does, and she has been creating characters and stories for them just as long. She also has a great passion for history (probably because it has the word story in it) as well as myths, both of which feature heavily in her creations. Drawing, animating and writing are her primary modes of sharing her stories with whoever is willing to hear. She hopes that one day her stories will pay rent for all the space they take up in her mind. When she’s not putting her characters through the wringer in the name of character development, she’s studying her best to make it through her course in one piece, hopefully with grades good enough to carry her through to her masters.

The winner of the Student Prize will be awarded £100 and will be announced on the same evening as the main Fiction Prize award ceremony, which will be held on 25th of May 2023.

Dr Isobel Maddison says, “the judges were delighted with the standard of entries for the 2023 Florence Staniforth Prize and discussed the resulting shortlist at length. We were all impressed with the variety of approaches to the short story form and the range of topics covered. Another excellent year for the prize. Congratulations to everyone who entered.”

Dr Alex Freer adds, “This year the panel received an outstanding set of submissions that showed a wide range of style, subject matter, setting, character, and voice. It was a pleasure to read stories that were humourous, incisive, thoughtful and compelling. Some stories kept us guessing up until the end; others were direct and sustained meditations on interiority and life with others. The panel worked hard to select a shortlist from a strong field and all the shortlisted writers should be proud of their achievements.”

Read more about the Prize and the judges here

You can read extracts from the shortlisted stories below.

2023 Student FP by Lucy Cavendish