Share your secrets with us

TODAY WE LAUNCH THE SECOND SCOTSMAN & Orange Short Story Award, which is not only the most lucrative of its kind in Britain but a competition aimed at uncovering the very best in new Scottish writing.

Next May we will present the winner with a cheque for 7,500, but many other writers will benefit as well. For a start, five runners-up will each receive 500. On top of that, 15 other writers will be paid for their stories appearing in the book that Edinburgh publishers Polygon will launch on the night of the awards.

Already North, the book of this year’s competition, has sold out completely and we expect the same to happen next year, not least because it will also contain three specially commissioned stories by a trio of Scotland’s finest writers - Jackie Kay, Bernard MacLaverty and Ali Smith.

They, like everyone entering the 2005 Scotsman & Orange Short Story Award, will be asked to write on the theme of "Secrets". On the entry form printed on page two of this magazine, we offer a few more hints about what we’re looking for, but here we’ll just say this: use your imagination.

Think of all the different kinds of short story you could write using just that word as inspiration. By all means give us a traditional "twist-in-the-tale" story, but look at the ones Scottish writers pick out below as the best examples of the genre and note how few of them conform to that paradigm.

For the short story offers other possibilities, too. It can, perhaps more intensely than the novel, recapture the essence of a single, live moment. The short story can distil the core of a novel into one short scene, uncover some deeply personal truth, or swing out into myth and poetry.

There are examples of all of these types of short story in the writers’ choices below. We asked them to pick both their favourite Scottish short story and their all-time favourite, and to explain the reasons for their choices.

Ask yourself what your own answer would be (and tell us: see the panel below). If you can think of your answer straight off you would be, I suspect, in a minority. While most people are generally clear about their favourite novels and poems, they are altogether less certain about their favourite short stories.

The reason for that is simple: compared to other literary art forms the short story is commercially, culturally and critically under-represented. While novels can be entered for a plethora of awards (latest example: the Man Booker Prize this week), while even poetry is starting to market itself (latest example: National Poetry Day, 7 October), this short story competition is almost the only one in Britain with a substantial cash prize that is also free to enter and offers 20 winners the chance of paid publication.

Yet the short story is an art form at which Scots writers excel (whisper it unboastfully, in far greater numbers than their counterparts south of the Border). It’s an art form which we at The Scotsman are determined to celebrate and encourage. We couldn’t do it without the help of our partner Orange, who share our aims in this regard, or without our massed army of writer-readers, whom we are now asking to unleash their creative imagination. To both, our deepest thanks.

Make mine a short - authors reveal their top tales from home and abroad

JENNY BROWN

Best Scottish: My new favourite is Jackie Kay’s "You Only Go When You Can No Longer Stay", about the relationship between two women. It’s very funny, there’s loads going on under the surface.

Best world: Any one of the 12 stories in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, Alistair MacLeod’s superb collection. Fabulous, eternal stories.

RON BUTLIN

Best Scottish: Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Markheim" is a masterpiece that has all the intensity of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment - and is also set in a pawnbroker’s shop. It is witty, and profound - even after a score of re-readings.

Best world: It has to be Chekhov - but which one? After making several unsuccessful attempts to write a novel, he eventually settled for depth rather than length and went on to write hundreds of stories, very many of which are utterly first-rate. "Ward 6" presents all human society in miniature, it is a work of acute psychological insight, sadness and deep compassion. Like many of his stories, it is also a most compelling read.

MEAGHAN DELAHUNT

Best Scottish: At the Word Festival in Aberdeen this year I heard James Kelman read "The Burn". It’s about this disaffected man walking home along the burn and just reeling back through his life. It’s absolutely heart-rending. When he read it, I didn’t dare breathe in case I missed a single word.

Best world: Raymond Carver’s "Errand" in Elephant and Other Stories, about the death of Chekhov, which is just so full of telling details, takes you inside the heads of minor characters and is wonderful and moving - and of course, it’s got Chekhov in it as well.

RONALD FRAME

Best Scottish: I was knocked out by a story I read, aged 16 (I started writing myself a year later), "Peacocks and Pagodas" by Dorothy K Haynes. A quarryman’s wife re-papers a room one day. That’s all: but in 2,000 words Haynes recounts, with a sublime blend of matter-of-factness and tenderness, the whole of that woman’s life. How unjust that she isn’t included in the new Scotland’s pantheon.

Best world: Vladimir Nabokov’s glorious fluent "Spring at Fialta" soars free of all stylistic excesses. It zings with life, its muddle and beauty, a sense of what it’s like to be alive.

JANICE GALLOWAY

Best Scottish: Robert Louis Stevenson’s "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". It’s only around 70 pages long: people forget that it works its magic on such a short fuse, but it can and does, and that makes it a short story in my opinion.

Best world: I’d have to roll-call the incomparable Marguerite Duras’s story, "The Cutter-Off of Water", from Practicalities, for sheer impact on both head and heart, and terrific economy (four pages only). Then I cheat and name another - Barbara Gowdie’s "Flesh of my Flesh", from her stunning collection We So Seldom Look on Love. Both of them have a steep emotional rush and a simultaneous depth charge - they are quite extraordinary.

BERNARD MacLAVERTY

Best Scottish: When I first came to Scotland, one of the stories that struck me was James Kelman’s "The Hitchhiker", though I also loved stories by George Mackay Brown and Alasdair Gray. Of late, I found myself hugely impressed by the few short stories I read in Colette Paul’s debut collection. It’s great to see someone arriving with a fully formed and mature voice. Alistair MacLeod is a Scot by origin who would also compete on the world stage. "The Closing Down of Summer" from his Island collected stories has something Chekhov manages to do - it manages to be magical without you knowing why, you can’t see his artistic wheels, gliding along.

Best world: It has to be James Joyce’s "The Dead" or Chekhov’s "Lady with a Lap Dog". For me, with my Belfast upbringing, Michael MacLaverty (no relation) was particularly important. His "The Poteen Maker" is one of my all-time favourites.

KIRSTY GUNN

Best Scottish: James Kelman’s "That Thread" is only a page and a half long but has a sense of utter immediacy, it takes you through a full emotional range of yearning and love. All that happens is that a man sees a woman across a room at a party and yearns for her, but there’s something quite perfect about it.

Best world: "At the Bay" by Katherine Mansfield is a story I find myself returning to it over and over again, as though returning home. It has an emotional, physical and imaginative density and a range of characters. I live in this story and it becomes a richer place to be every time I go back to it. If ever I have to go into hospital I take it with me as a kind of comfort blanket.

COLETTE PAUL

Best Scottish: "In Between Talking About the Elephant" by Jackie Kay is a story that has stayed with me since I read it. As the narrator’s lover dies, the couple communicate their sorrow and love for each other through sharing stories about the rituals, joys, and griefs of elephants. The ending is incredibly sad, and just right.

Best world: ‘Day of the Butterfly’ by Alice Munro. It brilliantly describes the ambivalence the young narrator feels in befriending an unpopular, lonely little girl in her class. Like all Munro’s stories, the ending leaves you awed by the mystery, complexity and sadness behind everyday experiences.

IAN RANKIN

Best Scottish: For a Scottish short story, one that keeps coming back to me is "Bampot Central" by Christopher Brookmyre, which you can find both on his website and in the crime anthology Fresh Blood II - a shaggy dog tale of a crime comedy set in Edinburgh, about a post office hold-up that goes wrong. It’s very funny and uses all the clichs of the crime story but subverts them.

Best world: My favourite short story is called "Home Made" by Ian McEwan. It’s the very first story he published, in his first collection, First Love, Last Rites. When I was 15 or 16 and trying to write short stories I saw the collection reviewed on Melvyn Bragg’s book programme on television and went out and bought a copy. I was so seduced by his style that I tried to copy him - and that was really the beginning of me trying to find my own voice.

ALI SMITH

Best Scottish:Jim Kelman’s "Acid", only about 140 words long, about a man who’s fallen in a vat of acid and an old man who turns out to be his father comes along with a long pole and as he pushes him under he says "Sorry Hughie". The whole story’s about acid, about being eaten away, kindness and harshness; not a word is wasted.

Best world: Grace Paley is the best short story writer in the world and my favourite of hers is "Conversation with My Father" about an old man who is dying and having a row argument with his daughter - about stories, actually. Tying with that is Chekhov’s "After the Theatre", only four pages long, about a girl who’s just come back from seeing Eugene Onegin, she’s just full of love and sadness and life.

Have our writers got it right? Which short story do YOU think is the best in Scotland and the best in the world?

E-mail: [email protected]. A bottle of Champagne will be awarded to the first reader whose two choices match the most-popular readers’ choices in each category.