Bestselling author Naomi Wood wins 2023 BBC national short story award
Naomi Wood has won the 2023 BBC national short story award for Comorbidities, a story about a married couple struggling to maintain their sex life who eventually decide to make a sex tape.
The bestselling author and UEA creative writing lecturer was presented with the £15,000 prize at a London ceremony on Tuesday by judging chair and presenter Reeta Chakrabarti, who called Wood’s story a “sparkling gem” written with “a light and wry touch” but which “tackles serious themes”.
“It feels amazing,” said Wood after finding out that she won. “I have entered quite a few prizes this year and been on the longlist and shortlist so I thought maybe it was in the waters that I was going to be bridesmaid and never bride.”
The winning story explores motherhood and parenting, the climate crisis and mental health. “I guess the main thrust of Comorbidities is how to maintain intimacy and love when you’re assailed with caring responsibilities, work, climate change, family – this supermassive cluster of 21st-century anxieties and tensions,” said Wood.
Wood has written three novels – The Godless Boys, Mrs Hemingway and The Hiding Game – and Comorbidities is from her forthcoming collection, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, due to be published in June 2024. Wood is from Liverpool and now lives in Norwich.
“It means a huge amount for my story to be recognised for the first time in this way,” said Wood. “I love writing short stories, but it has taken me three novels and over a decade to get there. Only now do I feel like I understand them.
“I started writing this story three years ago, when my kids were one and five, which is a crucially exhausting time for parents when you don’t have any time for yourself, or your relationship, and the only vibrato that buzzes through everyday life is just this constant hum of sleeplessness,” she added.
Comorbidities “stood out because it felt bang up-to-date and contemporary”, said Chakrabarti. “Each character is beautifully defined, and the panel felt this was a story with lots of ‘edges’ – that is, with many points of contact for the reader”.
Joining Chakrabarti on the judging panel were the writers Jessie Burton, Okechukwu Nzelu and Roddy Doyle and BBC Audio books editor Di Speirs.
Other authors that were shortlisted for the award were Kamila Shamsie, K Patrick, Cherise Saywell and Nick Mulgrew. Each of the shortlisted writers will receive £600 and will have their stories published in an anthology along with Wood’s. The stories are also available to listen to on BBC Sounds.
The winner of the 2022 award was Saba Sams with Blue 4eva. The competition seeks to celebrate the best short story writing by UK nationals or residents who have a previous record of publication.
Also announced on Tuesday was the winner of the BBC young writers’ award with Cambridge University, which went to 18-year-old Atlas Weyland Eden from Devon. His story, The Wordsmith, is about a man who creates words from raw materials brought to him by animals. The award is open to all 14 to 18-year-olds living in the UK.
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Comorbidities by Naomi Wood
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For a while Mason had wanted to spice things up in the bedroom. “If we don’t make an effort now, there won’t be anything left toimprove,” he had said, and though I knew he was right, I was also tired. I was always with the kids. His work was crazy. Even sex once a week was an effort, and often as soon as we got into bed its warmth overcame us.
When I thought about our lives, I thought about the therapy pie charts on the Internet, where they cut the pie into slices of time: like, here’s your pie for work, pie for sleep, pie for kids. I knew our sex pie was so thin it could barely stand on its own. More of the pie had to be given to sex: all the websites said that. They also said that if you don’t have sex now, you can’t have sex later – and I knew we couldn’t stay on this minimal sex percentage for ever, but we were tired! We were both so tired!
I also spent a lot of my time communing with the kids. I think Mason was a little jealous of my romance with Aida (6) and Casper (1). Often, I felt lovestruck with my babies. Mason was always having to pull me out of their beds because I’d fallen asleep, generally communing, amygdala to amygdala. Sometimes, it felt as if both babies were still inside me. I had read that the Y-chromosomes of boy foetuses have been found in the bones of dead mothers. Once they are inside you, they are inside you forever, sweeping through you with a Coriolis Force that went “I love you/you drive me nuts/I love you/ you drive me nuts” which would bore down to Australia before you got to the end; and besides, it always ended up with “I love you”, because that’s the way it went with your kids.
This is how my love felt for Aida and Casper: bone-deep; viral.
A good deal of my pie chart (like maybe 8%) was also spent tracking the global melt of the polar ice shelfs according to the NASA website, which was a large percentage, particularly in comparison to the zero-point something of our sex-life. My capacity to worry about anything really was capacious, even profound, though I personally could not see how anyone slept at night, when floods, intensified storms, and freak supercanes were already bearing down upon us.
The other mothers at Rhyme Time could see it in me, this craziness, this relentless worry. They avoided me and talked with each other. I sang the nursery rhymes, but with very little heart. Sometimes I’d talk to them but it always ended up in eco-doom: “Do you think our babies have a future?” I’d say. “Will it be too hot to breathe?” But they did not want to hear of our babies’ extinctions. They wanted to sing “Old MacDonald had a Farm”, over and over, though the farm would be ashes, the animals, charcoal, and the MacDonald’s and their kiddiewinks, burned in their beds.
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When Aida started to ask about Climate Change, I levelled with her: “It’s all our fault,” I said, but mostly Granny and Grandad: Cherry and Zhe Shing, her ma maand yeh yeh. Then Aida would run around butt-naked in the house screaming “The world is on fire! The world is ON FIRE!” while Casper played with his new bottle, mauling the nipple with his teeth. “Mason,” I said, in the middle of one night. “Do our kids have a future?”
“I’m asleep.”
“I know, Mason, but I’m scared.” “You’re always scared, whereas I have almost no opportunity to sleep.” This seemed too good to have been made up on the spot. “Did you practise that?”
“Maybe,” he said, rolling over, and I thought he really was asleep but then he said, “You need to de-catastrophise. None of this helps the world.” This is why I’m not horny! I wanted to say, the world on fire is not arousing! But in the morning I gave Mason a blowjob, as a way of saying sorry that I woke him, and sorry that our sex-pie was so thin. “Thanks,” he said afterward. “We needed that.”
Mason was a celebrity Mental Health nurse. Day in, day out, he was saving the lives of all the teenagers butchered by the Internet: its hateful gossip, its rancorous memes, its 24/7 bullying. He listened to teenagers talk him through their suicide plans, and then carried that home. Sometimes I read his Twitter feed to see what he was feeling, to trace the graph’s curve of years spent in the NHS (x) and his personal sense of failure to the kids he had lost in his high-security ward (y).
That morning, the morning of the BJ, he put out the stuff for breakfast and whistled as he went. I wondered, if I had chimerically morphed with the kids, whether his brain might be equally comorbid with his dick.
We heard through the kitchen the sounds of our neighbour Kelly and her daily panicked descant as she embarked on the school run. She had four kids. Four! I’d told her I’d only had as many kids as I had hands.
“Otherwise they’d be raised by feet,” she’d said, looking with darkening anxiety into the kitchen. Kelly was also very tired, but she always listened with sympathetic absence to my thoughts on the planet.
Mason was right, though. My catastrophising wasn’t helping. Aida’s drawings showed the charred remains of lollipop trees, and when I looked at my babies there was a fiery orb around them, as if their aura re-circulated the cognitive blazes I privately envisioned. Mason had asked me to please not discuss this with his mother, because these conversations always went badly, but one day Cherry somehow embroiled me in the discussion.
“If I stop eating pork,” Cherry said, “the world is not going to suddenly get better.”
Mason shot me a look. He had been at the hospital for a long time; I could see the length of his shift in his face.
“No,” I said, “but if everyonestopped eating pork it might.” Casper kept on yanking at my bra. I was sure I still smelled of milk, though I had stopped breastfeeding weeks ago. Probably it was glandular. Maybe I was secreting it.
“Squeezy’s so hungry,” she said, which was the name she used instead of Casper. She picked him up and settled him on her lap. “Aren’t you, baby?”
“Pigs fart,” said Aida, hooking backward. “That’s why the world’s warming up.”
Cherry narrowed her eyes. “I did not live through decades of Communism to be told what to do here. If you’ve eaten boiled shoe leather, you notice the pork in your porridge. Aida, come here and count Squeezy’s fat rolls.”
Mason’s mother had hated our choice of name for Casper. Cherry had said it had supernatural connotations. (“Because of the Disney movie?” “Uhhuh,” she said. “Like the friendly ghost?” “Uh-huh,” she said again.) Mason insisted his mother had a point, or at least that the point, however outlandish it seemed to me, was culturally sensitive. In Hong Kong, Mason said, there were massive holes in skyscrapers, like three apartments wide, for bad spirits to fly though – did I know how much that ancient suspicion could cost a real estate company? Ten of millions! Not letting ghosts into your house was worth tens of millions of dollars! Naming your child after a Disney ghost was just inviting bad luck right into the crib.
But the real problem with Cherry was that she was always right, about everything. She’d swum from Shenzhen to Hong Kong to escape Communism, waded through the Mai Po marshes at dawn – and that was in the day when you’d be shot if caught. But I put my foot down on the Casper front, insisted it was a name I had long cherished (who knows) and as a result Cherry always gave him less lai seethan Aida at Chinese New Year, which was weird, because he was a boy, and, you know, etcetera…
“It’s their future,” I said, choking up, “that’s why I am concerned.” “Hey,” said Mason. “Are you crying?”
“I’m not crying.”
Since stopping breastfeeding I had felt very emotional. Perhaps I hadn’t been ready to stop, but Mason had this idea that when the baby was a year old it was time to let them go. In truth, while feeding Casper, I had never felt sure of my boundaries. There had been merge. Ontologically, I had felt somehow synthesised. I had loved it, and at the same time felt stranded by it.
“It’s the milk,” said Cherry, “it’s coming out of your eyes.”
“It’s not the milk coming out of my eyes.”
Cherry looked at me and crossed herself. Cherry was both a Taoist and a Baptist, I guess to hedge her bets. “If you have another baby,” she said, “then you can feed that one too. Mason said you’re sad about stopping.” “I’m not sad. I’m fine.”
Cherry desperately wanted us to have a third child. Perhaps it was because she herself had had only one.
“There are already too many people in the world,” I said. “Nonsense.” She looked at Mason. “Poor Mason, you look so tired. Why don’t I take Squeezy too next Saturday?” she said, actually winking. “When was the last time you were by yourselves? You can have a date night!” “I don’t think so,” I said, before Mason could agree.
“Squeezy’s on the bottle now. I can give him that.”