Colwill Brown has won the BBC National Short Story Award with her “tense” and “increasingly heartbreaking” story, You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle, which explores the long term effects of trauma, told in “energetic South Yorkshire dialect”.

The judges praised the story, written in second person, for its “startling prose” and “astonishing” voice. It follows teenager, Shaz, whose life is changed forever after a brutal incident with two boys, one of them the boyfriend of her best friend. It is set in a small community and explores the power of shame and its lasting impact, as Shaz keeps silent into adulthood, while her assailants move on with their lives, unaffected.

Talking about her story, Brown said: “The story was inspired by memories of growing up in Doncaster in the late nineties and early noughties, based on my sense of the atmosphere at that time, what it was like to be a teenager, in particular what it was like to be a girl.”

Chair of judges Di Speirs said: “From first reading, Colwill Brown’s story leapt from the page, alive and immediately compelling, deeply disturbing, a story we couldn’t forget. The brio of the dialect, the brilliance of both the second person narration and the handling of the passage of time, and above all the exploration of a life critically damaged in a moment, all made this our unanimous winner.”

You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle is available to listen to on BBC Sounds, read by Sophie McShera.