Anna Lewis wins for her story on this year's subject 'The Face"

Jane Murison and Retsepile Makamane shortlisted

London, 19.05pm, 9 June 2010: Cardiff based writer Anna Lewis has triumphed over 300 aspiring authors to win the ninth Orange/Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition.

Features Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Stephanie Rafanelli, presented a cheque for £1,000 to Anna Lewis at the Orange Prize for Fiction awards ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre in central London.  The winning story will be published in the October edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, on sale in September.

Entrants to this year’s competition were asked to write a story of no more than 2,000 words on the theme of ‘The Face’.  Entries were received from all over the world and three finalists were selected and invited to attend a writing masterclass in London.

Commenting on the winner, Carole Welch, Chair of Judges, said “All three shortlisted writers met the challenge of writing on the theme of 'The Face' in an imaginative and inventive way but differed in their styles and approaches, which made for an impressively varied shortlist but also a difficult choice. In the end the judges came to an amicable decision about the winner, but we all felt that each of the stories shortlisted had its merits and all three writers had great potential. We look forward to hearing more from them.”

Two other shortlisted authors, Jane Murison and Retsepile Makamane, will receive £500 each. All three writers also attended a creative writing class led by author and teacher, Greg Mosse, at the offices of Hodder & Stoughton in central London.

Now in its ninth year, the Orange/Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition aims to support unpublished writers at the beginning of their careers.

Previous winners have gone on to achieve notable literary success including Clare Allan, who won the first ever Orange/Harpers Bazaar Short Story Competition in 2001.  Her debut novel, Poppy Shakespeare, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006 and went on to be longlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Award for New Writers. The novel was also dramatised for television and broadcast to acclaim on Channel 4.