Ashani Lewis

The shortlists for the Society of Authors’ Awards 2025 have been revealed and include bestselling authors Matt Haig, David Nicholls, Elif Shafak and Ali Smith. There are seven shortlists across categories including prose, poetry and children’s literature: the ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Queen’s Knickers Award, the McKitterick Prize, the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize, and the books celebrated by the ADCI Literary Prize.

For Bazaar’s eighth annual short-story competition, the theme of ‘threads’ produced hundreds of submissions drawing on ideas from clothes and culture to communication and chronology, which were eagerly received, read, discussed and debated.

When I was 15, I lied to everybody except for my mother. “I’m going on a date,” I told her. “Have fun,” she said, without looking away from the talk show rerun she was watching. The beautiful guest, an actress, I think, was demonstrating what she could fit in the gap between her two front teeth—dollar bills, cherry stems, a paperclip and so on. “He’s 26,” I added. She looked up.