Cherise Saywell was announced winner of the 2024 BBC National Short Story Award at a ceremony at BBC Broadcasting House, taking home £15,000 for 'Ditto,' a story set in an isolated Australian town during a single dusk. It beat an all-female shortlist that included Caoilinn Hughes, 2021 winner Lucy Caldwell, Laura Beatty, and Merryn Glover. The story follows a boy called Ditto — his birth name withheld throughout — as he sits crouched in a lantana bush, having just made a phone call that may or may not save his mother. That's the entire external architecture. What Saywell builds inside it is the full weight of a child's moral emergency: love, fear, complicity, shame, and the physical nausea of being seen. The extract published with the award is worth examining in detail. Saywell withholds constantly — the nature of the threat, the mother's name until a stranger speaks it, even the time, which Ditto checks by feel rather than light, terrified that illuminating his watch face will expose him. The prose earns its restraint. The automated telephone voice cycling 'at the third stroke' in the background of a crisis call is the kind of small, exact detail that separates a good story from a precise one. Saywell's stated intent — to explore how children experience violence 'when they have no words for the things they are experiencing' — maps directly onto the story's formal choices. Ditto doesn't name what's happening. He feels it in his stomach, in his neck, in the unbearable eye contact with a neighbor who already knows. The gap between what the child perceives and what the adult reader infers is where the story lives. Saywell, born in Australia and based in Edinburgh since 1996, brings a substantial track record to this win: the Pindrop award, Mslexia prize, and VS Pritchett prize, along with shortlistings for the Bristol and Asham awards. She works for the Royal Literary Fund. 'Ditto' is available in full audio on BBC Sounds and will appear in the Comma Press anthology alongside the other shortlisted stories. The young writer's award went to 17-year-old Eloise Barrett for 'Bloodshed in Rafah,' a story about childhood under war.
