Send Nudes: By the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2022

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I don’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’m always thinking about what it looks like to be a young woman: about bodies and power, about friendships and family, about the ways we’re constantly looking to break free” Saba Sams wins 17th BBC National Short Story Award for Debut Story Celebrating the Power and Agency of YouthSaba Sams was identified by Granta publishers in April 2023 as one of twenty under forty-year-olds authors to watch for the future. Sams has already won the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award, and her short stories have been published in well respected literary magazines including the White Review and The stinging Fly. So her short stories clearly have widespread appeal. There’s no urgency here, no pang of desire or hunger, nobody even needs anything. In “Snakebite,” our protagonist Meg has a job at a bar, not because she needs the money she tells us but because she needs something to fill her time. She also goes to university, not because she wants to but because she doesn’t know what else to do. At one point in the story, she gives a man a blow job in a portable toilet, not because she wants to but because he’s offering cocaine in exchange. The cocaine isn’t something she really wants either, but her friend asked her to, so why not, I guess. Send Nudesis full of perceptive, raw accounts from girls growing into women everywhere – in clubs at closing time, on pub toilets, at free spirited music festivals and on make-do beach holidays. What ties the protagonists of each story together is a primal sense of what growing into yourself looks like – often chaotic, sometimes teetering on menacing, and yet always perfectly real. As they battle their own demons and others’ and as they fight for a space to fit into, they reveal some wonderfully incisive universal truths about womanhood.

A roiling, raw, gut-punch of a debut collection, best read in one sitting. Sams conveys the suffocation of being and the longing to break free - from parents, partners, children, convention, your own self - in tender, spare prose. I sat motionless for about half an hour after reading them; I can't wait to see what she writes next' PANDORA SYKES As with most short story collections I seem to prefer some stories to others but this one is being rounded up. Writing can feel really boring and lonely a lot of the time. I think if you can lean more into having fun with it, into keeping yourself energised, then that will come across in the work. How do you feel winning the BBC NSSA will shape you as a writer? Will it change your life, in any way, do you expect? Frank swims with his bag held above the surface. In her mind, Stella sees the water seeping into all the round outlines of the buttons, the ridges where the Dream Lens has been carved to fit, the film canisters sloshing aqua.It’s only Blue that jumps. Jasmine and Stella stay standing. Blue’s body is in the air for whole minutes before the sea swallows her whole. Stella watches the white foam spit on the surface and waits. Jasmine stops. They’re at the bottom of the street by now. The fairy lights have run out and things are a shade darker. Jasmine’s face is mostly covered by her hair, but Stella can see that her mascara is running.

Frank drives the girls into town, pulling into a bus stop to drop them off. He passes Stella a roll of notes through the window, to pay for dinner. This collection delves into the lives of different women at various stages of their lives, it was as if the stories were a snapshot of someone’s life. Each story examines womanhood, sexuality, and modern day issues. There are some very detailed and graphic topics such as abortion, abuse, sexual assault, adult/minor relationships. Although these themes are dark, the writing is simplistic and honest when writing about them.In “Snakebite” Meg falls into an intense relationship with Lara. Lara, motivated only by drink and sex, uses Meg for money, company and even simple bodily warmth. Every inch of us knows that Meg must rid herself of Lara, whose influence has ruined her university attendance, her relationship with her flatmates, and even her health, yet Meg clings on to Lara, because – we, too, understand – sometimes someone is better than no one. Jasmine shakes her head. She’s just using you to wind me up. Blue and I have been best friends since we were practically babies.