No, says Frank. You’re eighteen. Now down that pint. Down it. Something about having Frank around makes her a better daughter Blue’s hair is made up of tight curls that skim the waistline of her bikini bottoms. When she turns to leave, beads of water spray out from the ends and catch the sun. Blue pulls her legs out of the pool and stands up. Stella thinks that if she had a camera, she’d take a photograph of Blue right there, on the edge of the pool like that.

Praised for its ‘utter truthfulness’ and ‘authentic portrayal of the dynamics of familial relationships’, ‘Blue 4eva’ is a story about a newly blended family’s summer holiday. It was inspired by Sams’ memories of her own childhood holidays on Formentera and features twelve-year-old Stella as she deftly navigates the powerplay between her voyeuristic new stepfather, eighteen-year-old stepsister, Jasmine, and Jasmine’s best-friend, Blue. First drafted when Sams was a 19-year-old creative writing student at the University of Manchester, the judges were particularly enamoured by the ‘veracity of the writing’ and the portrayal of Stella, whose warmth, agency and strength of character, were both refreshing and empowering.

Talking about her story, Sams says: “It’s very special to have ‘Blue 4eva’ – a story I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since I was nineteen – be given this kind of esteem. I first wrote ‘Blue 4eva’ in rainy Manchester when I was a student, though it was very different then. The story was very short, more of a vignette, but I had fun with it. When I was writing Send Nudes a few years later, I returned to the story and started working on it again. 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. ‘Blue 4eva’ engages with sexuality too, particularly with queerness, in a subtle way that I found interesting to write.” 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,” Sams said. “Blue 4eva engages with sexuality, too, particularly with queerness, in a subtle way that I found interesting to write.” Under her makeup, Jasmine goes pink. Nico doesn’t notice; he’s looking at Blue. My English might not be good enough for this question, he says. Each tale left me wanting more, whilst a couple ended with literal goosebumps. I enjoyed the brutal honesty of the current sorry state of dating - something which the book centres around. To quote the view of one of the protagonists, "Two people don't sit on either side of a screen rather than either side of a coffee table if they're going to be completely honest about themselves". There were no thrills attached and the book does what it says on the label.

Everyone laughs at that, apart from Jasmine. Stella laughs so hard she nearly falls off her chair. When the laughter dies down, Jasmine’s looking right at her. Saba Sams has won the seventeenth BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University (NSSA) with ‘Blue 4eva’, a story about sexual identity, agency, power and class, taken from her debut collection, Send Nudes. Discussion around the stories, collectively, is whether the girls featured have a refreshing honesty, and agency, in how they respond to the events that surround them. (I heard Sams at the International Dylan Thomas readings in London in May 2023). In the stories where the choice isn’t theirs, the girls and women suffer not only the consequences – the narrative often ends before that – but more so the torment of the lead-up. That sense of something unknown coming permeates these stories, making them slippery in the hand and yet painfully simple at the same time. After all, the choice isn’t always ours. But life is certainly better when we make them – or so Sams would have you believe. This included stories on toxic female friendships, jealousy, abortion, sending nudes (hence the title), seduction, desire and the complex relationships to other women (eg mothers and daughters, best friends, the ex’s).Joining Day on the judging panel were Costa first novel award-winning novelist Ingrid Persaud; writer, poet and editor, Will Harris; Booker prize shortlisted novelist and professor of creative writing, Gerard Woodward; and returning judge Di Speirs, books editor at BBC Radio. Dragged along by their mums to a music festival, two teenage girls pursue experience over the course of one weekend. I saw, in an interview that Sams spoke about her writing ambition, and the purpose of her storytelling. It was the digression into childhood (in a hippy family? and circus?) that the the authors inexperience was obvious, the humour of previous stories felt too mature and there seemed to be no discernible change to writing style despite our protagonists now being children. These stories felt shoe-horned in, perhaps for variation but instead gave me whiplash. Whilst I admire any artist that pushes themselves there’s nothing wrong with writing what you know and where your strengths lie, especially as a debut author.