Zadie Smith’s tale of the quest for a new corset on New York’s East Side – “Rome says: enjoy me. London: survive me. New York: gimme all you got” – has been shortlisted for the BBC National short story award.

The all-female shortlist – the third for the award in nine years – pits Smith against her fellow Orange prize-winners Lionel Shriver and Rose Tremain, as well as Tessa Hadley and new talent Francesca Rhydderch, whose debut The Rice Paper Diaries won the Wales book of the year award for fiction. Over 550 stories were submitted for the BBC’s £15,000 prize.

Smith, who has said that she has “only recently become comfortable with the form” of the short story, makes the cut with Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets, in which her protagonist is forced to “haul ass across town to buy a new corset” amid the “crappy old buildings higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, ugly students, shitty pizza joints, delis, tattoo parlours” of the East Side. “New York just expects so much from a girl – acts like it can’t stand even the idea of a wasted talent or opportunity,” writes Smith. “And Miss Adele had been around.”

“About a month after the story was published I was walking down Broadway and a six-foot middle-aged black drag queen not unlike Miss Adele shouted over: ‘Liked that story, Miss Zadie!’ That’s about the best review I’ve ever had,” Smith has said.

Tremain’s The American Lover is “an intensely moving story of a life lost to love”, said the BBC, while Shriver’s Kilifi Creek sees a gap-year traveller – “another dewy-eyed Yank who confuses a flight to Africa with a trip to the zoo” – brush up against death as a swim turns out to be more than she bargained for.

Hadley’s Bad Dreams opens as “a child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface, which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open”, and according to the judges, “elegantly and precisely captures the moment when a child’s unexpected awakening exposes the unease and isolation lurking beneath the surface of her home life”. The Taxidermist’s Daughter, by Rhydderch, sees a young girl in postwar Wales become aware of her sexuality, and of an older man.

The shortlist was announced on Front Row on Wednesday evening. Chair of judges Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC, praised the “rich and varied” selection of stories, adding that the form “has a unique ability to capture a single defining moment”.

“It invites us to dive headfirst into another world and to savour an experience which can remain with us for a very long time to come. In their very different ways these five stories do just that,” said Yentob, who is joined as a judge by the authors Laura Dockrill and Adam Foulds, editor Philip Gwyn Jones and BBC Radio editor of books Di Speirs.

Speirs added that the shortlist “shows just how varied and how revealing a few thousand words can be”, with the five contenders featuring characters who “move from innocence to experience and in their own very particular circumstances, reflect moments of universal truth for all of us”.

The winner of the prize, which is run in partnership with Booktrust, will be announced on 30 September, and will join former winners including James Lasdun, Julian Gough and Sarah Hall.

This year’s shortlist:

Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley

The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Francesca Rhydderch

Kilifi Creek by Lionel Shriver

Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets by Zadie Smith

The American Lover by Rose Tremain