The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its tenth year.
Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.
Featuring: Richard Lawrence Bennett, Luke Brown, David Constantine, Tim Etchells, Nicola Freeman, Amanthi Harris, Andrew Hook, Sonia Hope, Hanif Kureishi, Helen Mort, Jeff Noon, Irenosen Okojie, KJ Orr, Bridget Penney, Diana Powell, David Rose, Sarah Schofield, Adrian Slatcher, NJ Stallard, Robert Stone, Stephen Thompson and Zakia Uddin.
Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited thirty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in chapbook format. Forthcoming, from Confingo Publishing, is Paris Fantastique, and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books (Salt).
RICHARD LAWRENCE BENNETT is a writer and psychogeographer based in Arundel, West Sussex. His work has been published in Ambit and in the Lounge Companion. He is seeking representation for his debut novel The Ramayana of Croydon about mysticism in south London. You can find out more about him at www.richardlawrencebennett.com.
LUKE BROWN is the author of the novels My Biggest Lie (2014) and Theft (2020). He grew up on the coast of Lancashire and works as an editor in London as well as teaching at the University of Manchester. ‘Beyond Criticism’ was shortlisted and commended for Best Original Fiction in the Stack Awards 2019.
David Constantine, born 1944 in Salford, has published several volumes of poetry, a novel and four collections of short stories – Back at the Spike (1994), Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009) and Tea at the Midland (2012). He is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. He was the winner of the 2010 BBC National Short Story Award and the 2013 Frank O’Connor Award.
Tim Etchells is an artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. His work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. As well as being Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University, he works in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of Sheffield performance group Forced Entertainment. His 2019 collection Endland (And Other Stories) was a reprise (plus new stories) of his 1999 collection Endland Stories (Pulp Books). He was the winner of the 2019 Manchester Fiction Prize.
