I’m not sure how many of you will be eligible to enter this – in all honesty, I’m not even sure if I can enter – but even if only one of you is able to have a go at this competition, this post will be justified, my work here will be done, and I can log off knowing I’ve done something useful (and how often can one say that?).

So. Recently announced is the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, a short story competition with a sizey prizey of £25,000. That’s the logo to the side there.

They’re looking for stories of up to 7000 words, and no theme is specified, and there’s a pretty impressive list of judges (even I have heard of them all). The possible hurdle to entry, though, is that the rules state “the authors must have been previously published in the UK or Ireland”. I don’t know if this means you have to have had a short story published, a novel or other book, or whether (and this is where people like me might sneak under the wire) comic stories and magazines count. And what about radio plays and TV sketches, or whole screenplays? I just don’t know.

Anyway, the prize is pretty alluring, isn’t it ? And there are five runner-up prizes of £500, which means it’s not quite a one-horse race. Entry is by hard copy (you have to send seven copies of your story), and the closing date is 30 November 2009, so you’ve got a while yet to work something up for it, if you’re going to enter… assuming you’re eligible to enter, I mean.

I’ll let you know if there are any updates about eligibility, but in the meantime, if you’re clearly and unequivocally in the ‘previously published’ category, then you might want to start putting some words together…