'Short stories are nearer poetry than anything.'

‘Short story is a terrible term, I much prefer the French term conte. I looked up the word "short" in the OED, and it is almost always used pejoratively. Short stories are nearer poetry than anything. They are like a conversation, a dialogue. And besides, some of them are quite long.'

Jane Gardam, whose 10th short story collection The Stories recently won the Charleston-Chichester Award for a Lifetime's Excellence in Short Fiction.