CK Stead wins Sunday Times literary prize

The newly established Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story award has bestowed its first prize on CK Stead of New Zealand for his story "Last Season's Man," a tale of intellectual ego in Croatia.

The award carries a cash prize of 25,000 pounds, and six shortlisted stories including the winner (taken from a pool of 1,152 submissions) will be published in The Sunday Times Magazine.

Judges for the award include Hanif Kureishi, A.S. Byatt, and Nick Hornby. Kureishi called "Last Season's Man" "a fine example of how a short story should be constructed and written," according to an interview on Stuff.

Christian Karlson Stead, who was born in 1932, has published over thirty books since 1964, works which include novels, poetry collections, and essays on literary criticism in addition to short stories. Stead was commended by the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2005. In the same year he was a finalist for the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize for his novel Mansfield, a fictionalized account of New Zealand short story author Katherine Mansfield's struggles to become an established writer during the first World War.