Best British Short Stories 2024

• Alan Beard has published two story collections, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (2010). His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Digbeth Stories, Litro, Leon, trampset, Outside Left, and Best Microfiction 2024. He is a longtime member of the Tindal Street Fiction Group.

• Kevin Boniface is a writer and artist from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

• Paul Brownsey is a former philosophy lecturer at Glasgow University. His first collection, His Steadfast Love and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.

• Claire Carroll is a writer and PhD researcher exploring how experimental short fiction can reimagine human relationships with the natural and non-human world. Her stories have been published in The White Review, The London Magazine, Gutter, 3:AM, Lunate, and Short Fiction Journal. Her debut collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer, was released in June 2024.

• ECM Cheung is a writer, filmmaker, pamphleteer, and bookseller based in London, originally from Birmingham.

• Jonathan Coe is the author of fifteen novels, the most recent being The Proof of My Innocence.

• Rosie Garland writes poetry, long and short fiction, and sings with the post-punk band The March Violets. Her poetry collection What Girls Do in the Dark was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her latest novel, The Fates, retells the Greek myth of the Fates, and her first short fiction collection is forthcoming in January 2025. In 2023, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and named by Val McDermid as one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK.

• Kerry Hadley-Pryce lives and writes in the Black Country, UK. She holds a PhD in creative writing and teaches at the University of Wolverhampton. She co-edited Writing Under Fire: Poetry and Prose from Ukraine & the Black Country. Her short stories have appeared in Best British Short Stories 2023, Takahe Magazine, Fictive Dream, and The Incubator. She has published three novels with Salt Publishing: The Black Country, Gamble, and God’s Country. Lie of the Land is her fourth novel.

• Timothy J Jarvis is a writer interested in the antic and strange. His novel, The Wanderer, was first published in 2014 and republished in 2022. His short fiction has appeared in various venues, and a collection, Treatises on Dust, was published in 2023. He lives in Bedford.

• Cynan Jones is an acclaimed fiction writer from the west coast of Wales. His work has been published in over twenty countries and in journals such as Granta, Freeman’s, and The New Yorker. He has also written a screenplay for the crime drama Hinterland, a children’s story collection, and stories for BBC Radio. He has won awards including the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award, and the BBC National Short Story Award.

• Bhanu Kapil lives in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. Her poetry collection How To Wash A Heart won the TS Eliot Prize. Two new editions of Incubation: a space for monsters were published in 2023.

• Sonya Moor writes and translates short fiction. Her work has been published in literary reviews and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2022, and has been recognized for awards such as the Cinnamon Literature Award, Seán O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition, and the Bridport Short Story Prize. Her collection The Comet and Other Stories is published by Cōnfingō, and her translation of Albertine Sarrazin’s The Crib and Other Stories is forthcoming.

• Ison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), and won the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Her short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. She was born in Manchester in 1971 and lives near Nottingham.

• Gregory Norminton is the author of five novels and two short story collections. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He lives with his wife and daughter in Sheffield.

• Nicholas Royle is the author of Telepathy and Literature (1990), The Uncanny (2003), and Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), as well as books on E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, William Shakespeare, and Hélène Cixous. He has also published two novels, Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), and a memoir, Mother (2020). He is co-author with Andrew Bennett of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth edition, 2023) and This Thing Called Literature (Second edition, 2024). His story ‘Strangers Meet We When’ is concerned with the first meeting between Enid Blyton and Royle’s grandmother, Lola Onslow, who illustrated several of Blyton’s fairy books in the early 1920s. The story originally appeared in David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (2023).

• Cherise Saywell was born and raised in Australia. She has published two novels, Desert Fish and Twitcher. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in periodicals and anthologies including Mslexia, A Short Affair, and Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. Her story ‘Guests’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2023. She lives in Edinburgh with her family.

• Kamila Shamsie was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of eight novels, including Burnt Shadows, A God in Every Stone, and Best of Friends. Her seventh novel, Home Fire, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Her story ‘Churail’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.

• Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art, particularly on artforms engaging with landscape and nature. His short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Litro, Lunate, Nightjar Press, Storgy, and Structo. His debut novel, The North Shore, was published in 2023.

• Charlotte Turnbull’s work has been published as part of the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize 2023, and by Nightjar Press, New England Review, McNeese Review, Denver Quarterly, and 3:AM Magazine, among others.

• Cate West is a writer, teacher, content designer, and editor who lives in the Midlands. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and was the 2022 Laura Kinsella Fellow at the National Centre of Writing. Her short fiction has been published by Nightjar Press, Lunate, Janus Literary, Northern Gravy, and The Amphibian, among others. Her debut novel is currently on submission.

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