27 April 2015

 The UK Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is an international award with the richest cash prize - thirty thousand pounds ($A58,243). The winner, Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and has lived in the US since 1996. The competition started in 2010 and she is the first female winner. 

Her story, A Sheltered Woman, tells the story of a Chinese-American nanny hired to spend a month and no more supporting a new mother and her baby; trying to keep detached from the emotional turmoil around her, she is also entrapped by her own past. A story of an outsider and the falseness of self-imposed isolation, it was first published in The New Yorker in March 2014.

Read the story here

Read an interview with Yiyun Li in the New Yorker