© REX SHUTTERSTOCK
For six months in 2018, I was a judge on the BBC National Short Story Prize. This was not a full-time job. In May they sent me 60 anonymous short stories, and I was supposed to whittle them down to 10 or 12—in the privacy of my own home. Then, at the end of June, my fellow judges and I met in a conference room of the London Library and spent a pleasant afternoon (with platters of cheese, fruit and cakes on the table, which slowly yielded to partial assaults), coming up with a shortlist of five.
A few weeks ago, I showed my kids 12 Angry Men, the original Sidney Lumet production. Henry Fonda plays an architect who quietly persuades a panel of jurors to vote Not Guilty—a “slum” kid has been charged with knifing his father. But the movie is really about the personal feelings the decision-making process churns up, the way it exposes prejudice. Judging the National Short Story Prize might more aptly be called “Five Friendly Writers,” but it also raised uncomfortable questions about what the hell we were doing.