The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth year
Inspired by Giles Gordon and David Hughes’s Best Short Stories series, which ran to ten volumes between 1986 and 1995, Best British Short Stories this year reaches its thirteenth volume.
Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.
‘If the latest iteration of Salt’s Best British Short Stories collection is anything to go by then the genre remains in safe hands.’ ―Lawrence Foley, TLS
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).
Alan Beard has published two story collections, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). He has had numerous stories in magazines and anthologies, most recently in Digbeth Stories, Litro, Leon, trampset, Outside Left and Best Microfiction 2024. He is a longstanding member of Tindal Street Fiction Group, who celebrated their fortieth anniversary in 2023.
Kevin Boniface is a writer and artist from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire.
Paul Brownsey is a former philosophy lecturer at Glasgow University. His first collection, His Steadfast Love and Other Stories, was published by Lethe Press, New Jersey, USA, and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards.
Claire Carroll is a writer and PhD researcher whose work explores how experimental short fiction writing can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world. Her short stories have been published by journals including The White Review, The London Magazine, Gutter, 3:AM, and Lunate, and Short Fiction Journal. Her debut collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer, was released in June 2024 by Scratch Books.
