I met Ryan on Tinder. He only had one photograph of himself on his profile, edited with a grainy filter. I thought he looked alright. I didn’t have much in the way of standards. My own picture wasn’t even really me; it was another lanky brunette that I’d found online, her face turned away from the camera. My bio was Tinderloin, after my favourite cut.
I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports. I’ve been faking nausea, headaches and stomach aches since I was six. I remember sitting at my desk, cheek resting in the fold of my elbow, trying to look sorry for myself, little piles of clothes on the carpet all around me. This was when boys and girls still changed together in the classroom. When PE began with hauling apparatus from the edges of the gym into the middle. Balance beams, cracked blue crash mats, waxy hoops. I started my period when I was eleven. That was a far better excuse. I’d say I had cramps every week, no shame. My swimming teacher would panic the second he heard the word. Period. I could drop it like a tiny bomb, and he’d look at the scuzzy tiled floor and wave me off. Even then I liked words, liked seeing what a word could do. I couldn’t give a shit what a ball could do, but a word.
The 26-year-old, who drafted the story about ‘complex family dynamics’ when she was 19, takes a £15,000 prize for the piece taken from her debut collection Send Nudes
Saba Sams has won the BBC national short story award for a tale described by the judges as having a “transportive atmosphere” and “masterful telling of complex family dynamics”. The 26-year-old has received the £15,000 prize, run by the BBC with Cambridge University, and the audio version of her winning story Blue 4eva is available to listen to on BBC Sounds.
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| Saba Sams |
The Send Nudes author, one of Granta’s pick of the best young British novelists, on young motherhood, feminism and why we need to break the rules around love
Saba Sams was in bed breastfeeding her two-month-old baby when she received an email saying that the publisher Bloomsbury wanted to offer her a book deal on the basis of some of her short stories. She was just 22 at the time. “I didn’t even think it was a book,” she says when we meet. “I was just learning how to write.”
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| Saba Sams |
The Send Nudes author’s follow-up conveys a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family
To be selected for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list two years before your debut novel comes out must bring a certain amount of pressure. Saba Sams had already been named a rising star for her short-story collection, Send Nudes; one of the stories, Blue 4eva, won the 2022 BBC National short story award. Now comes Gunk, titled for the grotty student nightclub managed by the thirtysomething protagonist, Jules. The fried egg on the cover hints at a sleazy edge: expect hangover breakfasts with a dawn chorus soundtrack. It’s also a playful nod to more tender themes of fertility panic, unplanned pregnancy and young motherhood.
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| Saba Sams |
The earthy resilience and joie de vivre of these stories about being a young woman today make for an exhilarating debut
Madeleine Feeny
Idon’t know if I was enjoying myself or just in a continual state of curiosity,” says Meg in Snakebite, one of 10 short stories in 25-year-old British author Saba Sams’s exceptional debut collection. Sams joins the ranks of writers such as Megan Nolan and Frances Leviston with these acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future.
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The Booker-shortlisted novelist on the seismic effect of Sigrid Nunez, and wanting to write like Virginia Woolf
My earliest reading memory
Asking my mom if she could stop reading my bedtime book to me and just let me read it on my own, since I felt she was going too slowly. The book was either Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, both by Roald Dahl.
My favourite book growing up
I loved Stuart Little, and all his small, clever things – his tiny canoe, his tiny sailboat. He had such a relaxed demeanor and was so dapper! I also loved Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series – tiny people living under the floorboards and improvising household goods out of “borrowed” safety pins and match boxes and so on. Clearly I had a thing for miniatures.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, because he was having such a good time and seemed so so smart, but was also mischievous and irreverent. It may sound corny but these stories made me grasp the existence of a world of art and literature. And Barthelme lived in Houston, where I was growing up, yet he was a major world writer.
The writer who changed my mind
In the early 90s, while I was in graduate school, I read Sigrid Nunez’s short story Chang, which later became a portion of her first book, A Feather on the Breath of God. “Chang” had a seismic effect on me. Up to that point, I can’t recall having ever seen a multiracial character in fiction. I was so accustomed to the default whiteness of fictional characters that I didn’t even notice the absence of characters from other backgrounds. And even as I was trying at that time to write short stories about my father’s life in Korea, I would give those characters white-sounding, European-sounding names, as if I was hoping to disguise their specificity. It really pains me now to look back on this tendency in my writing, which proceeded directly from the sorts of writers I was taking as models, like Virginia Woolf and Henry James. When I read Sigrid’s story I was astonished that the narrator was the daughter of a white European woman and a brown Asian man – just like me! I hadn’t realised this sort of character was possible. It’s sort of heartbreaking that my thinking was so constricted, but the disruption to that thinking was thrilling.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I wanted to be a writer from such an early age it’s impossible to choose a single book to hold responsible, but the book that made me want to be a certain kind of writer was To the Lighthouse. I so desperately wanted to write the way Virginia Woolf does in that book that it made my writing insufferable for a very long time.
The book I reread
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, which I despised at school, but now I’ve come to love the way I love certain comfort foods. It’s not the most nutritious and in some ways it’s repulsive, but the deep familiarity of it always hit the spot.
The author I came back to
Charles Dickens. For so long I associated him with unbearable Christmas television specials, so I didn’t actually sit down and try reading him until shockingly late, and then I was enthralled. I read Bleak House for the first time during the pandemic – it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.
The book I could never read again
Anything by Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume: they seemed great in my teens but now even just the titles make me cringe.
The book I discovered later in life
Homer’s Odyssey. Obviously I’d heard of it and must have read it for the first time in college, but it wasn’t until recently that I became completely fascinated by it and started wanting to reread it in different translations.
The book I am currently reading
I recently finished JA Baker’s The Peregrine, which is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It’s quite short, but the writing is so uncategorisable,immersive and transformative that I felt as if I’d been sucked into a different time-medium.
