We’re thrilled to share great news from four authors who’ve been published in our anthologies in recent years:

Today, 30th May, ‘A Ton of Malice‘ — The Half-Life of an Irish Punk in London, by Barry McKinley, is published by Old Street Publishing. Barry won second prize in BSSA 2016 with his wonderful story, ‘Almost Home’ . A review in The Times says of A Ton of Malice “This dazzling book is categorised as autofiction, which means autobiography with added fibs…”.

Tomorrow, 31st May,  Anne Corlett’s debut novel  The Space Between the Stars is launched in Toppings Bath.  Anne Corlett won the local BSSA prize in 2014 with The Language of Birds’ and  is also published in the  BSSA 2015 anthology  with The Witching Hour. “The Space Between the Stars deals with a woman travelling back to Earth to search for her lost love after a virus wipes out most of mankind.”

On July 11th, Rowena Macdonald’s novel ‘The Threat Level Remains Severe ‘ will be published by Aardvark Bureau. Rowena’s short story ‘Stars’ was published in  BSSA  2013 online anthology. Of The Threat Remains Severe’ writer Maureen Freely  says “Deliciously erotic and hugely readable, with some wonderful moments of illumination” Robert Edric writes,”Surely one of the most insightful, honest and resassuringly humane tales of the true workings of the Mother of Parliaments in all its shabby, slapdash and vainglorious reality”.

Eileen Merriman’s debut YA novel, Pieces of You,was published yesterday, 29th May in New Zealand by Penguin. Eileen’s publisher says “This is a brilliant, funny, heart-breaking love story about falling in love for the first time and dealing with the fall-out when things start to fall apart”…”Eileen is a really exciting new voice on the  YA landscape, we’ve already snapped up her second novel.” Eileen was commended in BSSA 2015 with her story ‘Hummingbird Heart’ and shortlisted in BSSA 2016 with her story ‘I Dare You.’ Read both stories in our anthologies for those years.

Congratulations to everyone. Four new wonderful books to add to our BSSA author shelves. We hope you will buy them too.

Jude, Jane Anna.

May 2017

Thank you to everyone who entered the International Bath Short Story Award this year. We closed 1st May, at the beginning of this week. You kept our administrator very busy on the last day!  Our stats showed that we had 2069 views on the website last Monday.  This year we had entries from 45 different countries.

We’ll reveal  the exact number of entries after the results are out in mid-late July. At the moment, the ten members of our initial reading team are busy enjoying your stories and selecting choices for the long list. It’s a very interesting process and everyone learns a lot from the stories submitted. The BSSA team selects the final long list and Senior Literary Agent from A M Heath, Euan Thorneycroft   will judge the short list and choose the winning and commended stories.

If you want to be first to get notifications of the long list, short list and winners, please subscribe to the  mailing list to receive emails on the side bar.

Good luck to all.

Jude, Jane,  Anna