Thank you very much to everyone who entered the 2018 International Bath Short Story Award. This year we received 1100 entries from thirty-four countries. Our team of ten initial readers enjoyed reading your entries and it was, as always, tough selecting the final fifty stories from a strong field. Authors from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, the USA and the UK are represented on the longlist and many different themes and subject matters are covered – including, this year, the effects of climate change and world politics, along with dystopian futures, relationships between family, friends and lovers, dysfunctional and otherwise. Such themes were widespread throughout all the entries and it is interesting to have different cultural takes on this mix.
We also thank Euan Thorneycroft, Senior Literary Agent from AM Heath, for judging the Bath Short Story Award shortlist for the second year in a row. He chose the three winning and two commended stories and we greatly appreciate the work involved as well as his helpful and constructive comments on the short list and on the winning stories, all of which you can see on this site. The BSSA team comment on and give a prize to an unpublished writer, which is the Acorn Award, and once again we are grateful for support from Mr B’s Emporium of Books, Bath who sponsor and donate the local prize. The sixth Bath Short Story Award Anthology containing these twenty shortlisted stories will be published and available for sale on this website and elsewhere in the Autumn. We’re looking forward to seeing this collection of wonderful stories in print.
Short stories are growing in popularity among writers and readers and our aim is to encourage people to write in this form. The next Award will open in early November and close in late April and hope you will enter.

Anna, Jane and Jude
BSSA Team, August 2018