Last month I sat down with my fellow judges to pick the longlist for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award - and came up with something remarkable.
My fellow panellists included a Booker prize winner (Anne Enright) and an Orange prize winner (Rose Tremain). The prize itself, at £30,000 the richest in the world for a single story, receives entries every year from some of the most recognisable names in literature.
This year, though, none of those famous writers made it onto our longlist of 14. Instead, we picked a group of fresh and exciting new names, many of whom - the American writers Kathleen Alcott, Bret Anthony Johnston and Victor Lodato, the Irish debut novelist Sally Rooney and her compatriot Ethel Rohan, the British author Richard Lambert - are, I confess now, new to me.