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.
 |
| 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.”
 |
| 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.
 |
| 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.
I’d started babysitting more regularly since moving in with Ivan. It wasn’t about the money. The rent at his flat was no higher than my last place. I did it because I liked the feeling of, having left, coming back. Surfacing on the tube to a text, Grab us some eggs? Striding through the wet streets, my cheap headphones scratching at my ears. The light going. Pit stopping in Sainsbury’s. Taking the stairs up to the flat, the soles of my trainers sticking to the lino, a Bag for Life slung over my shoulder. Letting myself in to find Ivan in the kitchen, a room that always looked too small for him, hunched over garlic cloves, tiny red chillies he’d grown in a pot on the windowsill. Remembering, in that moment, the first time I realised I was in love with him: the day he climbed over a garden fence to steal some pears from a stranger’s tree, and sat down next to me on the curb, eating them bottom to top, cores and all. I’d feel like a grown up, returning from work to this scene of domesticity, remembering the misadventures of youth.
She lay in his bed with her eyes open. His profile looked sharp against the lamplight, like a paper cut-out. She thought back to some long-ago summer. A birthday party. Paper chains strung through the trees. Square couples holding hands, little pastel loops. A slice of yellow cake wrapped in a napkin and squashed into the back seat of the car. The whole event sort of hazy, sepia. That was innocence. Not like here, with a plastic wine glass balanced in the folds of the duvet. A lump of hash lost in the carpet. The palm of his hand against the hot ache of her stomach; an IUD recently inserted into her uterus. How are you feeling? Frank paused the laptop, put his hand back on her belly, started kneading at the fat. Bit better, thanks. He leant over her, picked up the wine glass and took a long sip. She looked out at the moon. A hole-punch in the black window. Good. He bowed his head, kissed her shoulder. Shall we make this official then? She laughed. Yes, she said. Yes, let’s.
 |
| Hamnet |
Chloé Zhao’s film version of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-making novel powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama
Peter Bradshaw
6 January 2026
The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears …” This is Francis Bacon’s essay Of Parents and Children; maybe they were more secret in his day than ours. This kind of secrecy and revelation is part of Chloé Zhao’s deeply felt romantic fantasy about the origin of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. It locates the play’s beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the play’s first performance.
The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that the two could be used interchangeably. The movie is inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name – Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell – as well as the 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.
On one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading, based on treating Shakespeare like you would a contemporary novelist with contemporary ideas about the speakability of this kind of bereavement; it relies heavily on a name coincidence which could be simply that, a coincidence. Moreover, the Hamnetisation of tragic themes could as easily be applied to any of the plays. (Shakespeare’s horror at the death of Hamnet could have remained dormant for more years than this, and then surfaced in Macbeth at the murder of Macduff’s wife and young son.) You can remain unconvinced. And yet there is such terrific daring in Zhao and O’Farrell’s stretch: a thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human beings.
Zhao takes her movie at walking pace at first, following Agnes as she wanders endlessly through a forest, a habit that has earned her a witch-like reputation like her late mother, dreamily registering the sky through the branches and a hawk that has swooped down to her hand. Agnes is in a trance of rapture in the folk-horror woodland outside Stratford-upon-Avon, a premonition of creative inspiration from the depths of despair. It is an unselfconsciously beguiling performance from Jessie Buckley, who gives every look and smile a piercing significance. Her beauty captivates young William Shakespeare, a would-be poet seething at having to follow his abusive father into the gloving business, and played with intelligent force by Paul Mescal.
They marry, to the deep unease of William’s mother Mary (Emily Watson), and the film imagines Agnes having her first baby (Susanna) actually in the forest. But when she reaches the end of her second pregnancy, she is forced to give birth indoors, a bad augury; these are the twins Judith and Hamnet. And while William is away in London following his dream of becoming a star of the London playhouse, illness and calamity strike.
The death of Hamnet could be compared to that of Thomas Cromwell’s wife and daughters from sickness early in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; it is an inciting event, a terrible event which in some sense explains everything that happens next. Cromwell had to cauterise his inner agony by throwing himself into his career, pursuing it ruthlessly and making it of overwhelming importance – but he did not dwell on those that he has lost as Shakespeare is supposed to be doing here. Zhao and O’Farrell suggest that Shakespeare transformed and displaced his grief into every line of his play: the agony, the futility of carrying on, the dazed inability to decide on the point of anything. In a way, he, Shakespeare, is the ghost, the undead phantom condemned to wander miserably through the world while Hamnet is left alive. The boy’s soul has not been murdered as the father’s has.
It could all be true – although it comes down to the name, and there is a line in Romeo and Juliet about what there is in a name. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal is beautiful and pellucid and Max Richter’s score swarms all around the action. It is a film that moves because of the performances which are so absorbing.
Decades ago, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead provided a whole new way into Hamlet. Perhaps Zhao and O’Farrell will do the same thing with this tender and moving new creation myth.
Hamnet is out now in the US, on 9 January in the UK, and on 15 January in Australia.
Coogler’s vampire thriller swept the Oscar nominations over Chloé Zhao’s tearjerker and Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture thriller. This genre-defying drama about the black experience could now rule awards season
Agree with them or not, these Oscar nominations deliver a pert slap to the accepted assumptions of awards season. The industry had been expecting landslides for classy upmarket fare such as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and also for Josh Safdie’s delirious comedy Marty Supreme. And that’s what they got
