Best British Short Stories 2015

Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of seven novels, including: Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, and First Novel, and a short story collection, Mortality. He has edited sixteen anthologies, including A Book of Two Halves and Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing. He lives between London and Manchester and teaches creative writing at MMU.

Jenn Ashworth’s first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, won a Betty Trask Award in 2010. On the publication of her second, Cold Light, she was listed by the BBC’s The Culture Show as one of the UK’s twelve best new writers. Her third novel, The Friday Gospels, is currently being adapted for television. She teaches creative writing at Lancaster University and is one of the co-founders of Curious Tales, a writer-led performance and publishing collective.

Neil Campbell is from Manchester. He has appeared three times in Best British Short Stories. He has two collections of short fiction published Broken Doll and Pictures from Hopper. He also has two collections of flash fiction, Ekphrasis and Fog Lane. Salt published his debut novel, Sky Hooks in 2016. Zero Hours is the sequel to that book, and forms the second part of a Manchester Trilogy.

Emma Cleary is from Liverpool and taught English and Creative Writing at Staffordshire University. In her critical work, she writes about maps, jazz, and the city in diasporic literature. She lives in Vancouver, BC, where she is working on her first novel.

Uschi Gatward was born in east London and lives there now. Her stories have appeared in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume Six, Brittle Star, Southword and Structo, and have been performed by Liars’ League in London and New York, and at the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire.