Thank you very much to everyone from around the world who entered the 2019 International Bath Short Story Award, judged this year by Literary Agent, Samuel Hodder from Blake Friedmann and many congratulations to our winners: Caroline Ward Vine; Christina Sanders; Derek Routledge; Melody Razak; Bruce Meyer; Tannith Perry and Lucy Emma.

Our big thanks to Samuel Hodder for reading all the shortlisted stories so attentively, selecting the three top prizes and two highly commended and making comments on the winning stories and the process in general.

Thanks also to our large team of initial readers who had the fascinating job of reading the huge variety of stories that arrived. We had 1493 entries this year and our longlist of eighty stories represents the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, Spain and India.

Stories in the shortlist of twenty include important themes echoed throughout all the entries. We have several stories about those living precariously on the edge of society due to their sexuality, their status as immigrants, their youth or age or the climate emergency. There are stories about family and couple relationships, different angles on loss and many political references. We are glad to be able to publish them all in our seventh anthology, this year produced by local Award winning publisher who also published the 2018 anthology for sale from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop and on Kindle and Nook. Ad Hoc Fiction. The anthology will be out at the end of the year and launched in Bath.

Our next Award will open on November 1st 2019 and end in April 2020. Do subscribe for email notifications, to be first to hear about it and to read news and interviews from all our winners, past and present.

We very much appreciate your support and we are looking forward to reading entries for BSSA 2020, our eighth Award.
Anna, Jane and Jude.
BSSA organising team.