This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the third-place winner of the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, ‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti. In Brunetti’s riveting coming-of-age story, an exchange student’s stay in the French countryside becomes increasingly tense when she discovers her host’s sister has a life-threatening eating disorder. This year’s judges admired the ‘lucid and exacting prose’ of ‘Peach’, as well as the way it ‘conjures a phenomenal atmosphere of dread’.

Ursula Brunetti is a writer living between the Isle of Wight and Paris. She has won the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and the Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize. She holds a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and is currently working on her début novel.

‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti is published in the August issue of ABR.