Our big thanks to Sophie Haydock, award winning novelist and shortstory champion, for judging our Award this year and for her appreciation of the form, her general comments on the shortlisted stories and her individual comments on the winners. What great stories! We are looking forward to publishing all of them, the winners and the shortlisted, in our 2024 anthology.

Sophie’s Report Continue reading →

Huge congratulations to all our BSSA 2024 winners! Such wonderful and varied stories selected from a very strong field in the shortlist. You can read Sophie Haydock’s comments on the winners’ stories and on the shortlist in general in her judge’s report. You can also read the bios of all the shortlist here

First Prize: ‘To Hail the Pale Horse Rider’ by Connor Donahue

Connor Donahue is an aspiring novelist currently pursuing his MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from The University of Kansas. In his stories, he enjoys writing about monsters, mucking about in dark waters, and fretting about human capabilities. He has previously been published in Intrepid Times and by The BBC, and his latest project is a novel set in a haunted bible college in his home state of Missouri. He misses the BBQ from his home state but does not miss the tornados. He lives and writes in Belfast.

Second Prize: ‘The Glitter Path’ by Jane Fraser

Jane Fraser lives, works and writes fiction in a house facing the sea in Llangennith, on the Gower peninsula, south Wales. She is the author of two collections of short fiction, The South Westerlies (2019) and Connective Tissue (2022) both published by SALT. Her debut novel, Advent (2021) was published by Welsh women’s press, HONNO, and awarded the SoA’s Paul Torday Memorial Prize in 2022. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works series.She has a PhD in Creative Writing (Swansea University), is a Hay Festival Writer at Work, and importantly, is grandmother to Meg, Flo and Alice.
X: @jfraserwriter Instagram: @janefraserwriter W: www.janefraserwriter.com

Third Prize: ‘Foxed’ by Marie Geth­ins.

Marie Gethins featured in Winter Papers, Bristol Short Story Prize, Australian Book Review, NFFD Anthologies, Banshee, Fictive Dream, Pure Slush, Bath Flash Anthologies, FlashBack Fiction, Jellyfish Review, Litro, REED and others. Awarded B.A.’s in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture and Dra­matic Art/Dance from U.C. Berke­ley, an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick. She received a Frank O’Connor Bursary, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity residency and a Hawthornden Fellowship. Selected for Best Microfictions, BIFFY50, Best Small Fictions, she is the flash editor for Banshee and co-edits for Splonk.

Winner of the Acorn Award for an Unpublished Writer of Fiction: ‘Fishing At Pisa Airport’ by Ruth Clarke.

Ruth Clarke lives in Norwich – the ‘City of Stories.’ She began writing fiction last year, taking courses with The Arvon Foundation and National Centre for Writing. This will be her first published story.

Highly Commended and also winner of the Local Prize ‘King of the Rec’ by Rob Campbell.

Rob Campbell splits his time between Bristol and Dartmoor and is married with two children. After a career in newspapers and education he began writing fiction and is working on a novel inspired by his PhD in journalism history from the University of South Wales. Rob has been highly commended in the Regional Press Awards for his column which ran in the Western Daily Press for 23 years, and in the Hastings Book Festival for fiction. He writes about art for the Friends of the Royal West of England Academy, and is a mentor for the Longford Trust.

Highly Commended: ‘Ripples’ by Ben Howels.

Ben Howels hails from Exeter, England. A lawyer for many years, he eventually accepted the inevitable conclusion – that fictional worlds were more interesting than offices.He has previously been published everywhere from Writers Online to Spring Song Press,The Arcanist, and All Worlds Wayfarer. He’s also written three novels, and one day hopes to get them into print.
Ben can usually be found down the gym, hanging/falling off jugs at a climbing wall, or on X/Twitter – @BenHowel

Many congratulations to all the writers on our 2024 shortlist. You can read judge Sophie Haydock’s general remarks on the list in her judge’s report. We’re looking forward to seeing all these wonderful stories in print in our 2024 anthology.

Sallie Anderson, shortlisted with ‘Everything is Fine on Co-ordinated Universal Time’ is a bookseller living in Gloucestershire. Her stories have been listed and commended in a number of competitions, published in magazines and anthologies, and performed at events like Stroud Short Stories. She’s easily distracted from her own writing by reading and talking about stories and books.

Lynn Bushell, shortlisted with ‘And Then When The War Was Over‘ started writing as a means of subsidising her work as an artist.Her stories have won prizes in The London Magazine and London Independent Story Prize competitions and reached the finals of the Fish Memoir, ChiplitFest and Yeovil short story competitions and she has twice been longlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. Her novel Painted Ladies (2019 Sandstone Press), about the artist Pierre Bonnard, featured in the Bonnard exhibition At Tate Modern. She lives partly in Suffolk and partly in Normandy, where she has a studio.

Finola Cahill, shortlisted with ‘What Are You After is a writer and musician from Co. Mayo, Ireland. Her poetry has featured in Propel, The London Magazine, the Honest Ulsterman, and others. She was the 2023 winner of the Waterford Poetry Prize and the 2024 winner of the Listowel Writers Week Single Poem Award. She is at work on her debut collection of poems and a longer work of fiction. This is her first fiction publication.

Debra A.Daniel, shortlisted with The House on Datura Street is Once Again For Sale has published two novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster (AdHoc Fiction), Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (novel), and two poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August and As Is. She’s a Pushcart and Best Short Fictions nominee. She won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize, received the SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has been longlisted and shortlisted in many contests and has appeared in: Snow Crow, Legerdemain, LA Review, Smokelong, Kakalak, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and others.

Susan Elsley shortlisted with, ‘421 Words for Snow.’ lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and writes short and long fiction with a focus on people and places. Recent work has been published in Crannóg, Paperboats, The Storms, Fictive Dream, Postbox, and Northern Gravy. She won the Ennis Book Club Festival prize in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Writing Award in 2023 and Moniack Mhor’s Emerging Writer Award in 2019. She is chair of a local literacy trust and has a background in human rights.

Emily Devane, shortlisted with ‘Erratics’ is a writer, editor, teacher and bookseller from Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Her short fiction has been widely published in journals such as Smokelong Quarterly, Ambit and The Lonely Crowd. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Word Factory Apprenticeship and a Northern Writers’ Award. Emily teaches creative writing workshops (@wordsmoor), co-hosts Word Factory’s Strike! Short Story Club and runs regular spoken word nights.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski,shortlisted with ‘As Yet Untitled’ studied creative writing and English Literature at the University of Evansville, then Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as Co-Director National Flash Fiction Day (UK) and Editor-in-Chief of FlashFlood. She loves shortform writing in all its forms and has won awards such as the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her collection Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping was a runner up in Bath Flash Fiction’s first Novella-in-Flash Competition. Find her online at www.ingridj.com and on Twitter @LunchOnTuesday.

Karen Jones shortlisted with ‘Fair Days’ is a flash and short fiction writer from Glasgow. Her story ‘Small Mercies’ was included in Best Small Fictions 2019. She has won 1st prize in Cambridge Flash, Reflex, and Flash 500 and 2nd prize in Fractured Lit’s Micro Fiction Competition. She has been shortlisted for Bath Short Story Award five times. Her first novella-in-flash When It’s Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction and her ekphrastic novella-in-flash Burn It All Down is published by Arroyo Seco Press. She is an editor for the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology.

Anna Linstrum, shortlisted with ‘Diana Ball’ began acting professionally when she was fourteen before becoming a theatre director in her twenties, working for nearly two decades in new writing and musicals, in the West End and internationally, until a combination of the pandemic and late motherhood shifted her focus to writing. She has since had three plays broadcast on Radio 4, and her fiction has been shortlisted for The Alpine Fellowship Prize, The HG Wells Story Competition, and longlisted for the Fish Publishing prize as well as (twice) for The Bristol Short Story Prize. She is currently writing a stage play.

Emily Macdonald, shortlisted with ‘Ring-Tin Tin’ was born in England but grew up in New Zealand. She lives in London and works in the UK wine trade. She has short stories, flash and micro fiction published in anthologies and online journals such as Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Free Flash Fiction, Raw Lit, Roi Fainéant and The Phare. Her collection of driving related stories, Wheel Spin and Traction, was published in November 2023.

Jay McKenzie shortlisted with ‘Jellyfish’ is the author of Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure (Serenade Publishing, 2023). Her work has appeared at or is forthcoming in adda, Unleash, Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Ulu Review, Reverie, Roi Faineant and other publications. Winner of the Exeter Story Prize and others, she was shortlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is a nomadic Brit who has lived in Greece, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia. She lives with her husband, daughter and too many cardigans. Find her at www.jaymckenzieauthor.com or on Instagram @jay_writes_books

Slawka G. Scarso shortlisted with ‘First Anniversary’ works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and Scrawl Place among others. Her debut novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. Two of her stories are featured in the 2023 Best Microfiction Anthology. She lives in Italy. You can find her on X and Instagram as @nanopausa and on http://www.nanopausa.com

2024 Bath Short Story Award Long List
TITLE	AUTHOR
	Susan Elsey
	Fiona Dignan
	Lynn Bushell
	Ingrid Jendzrejewski
	Jennifer Wawrzinek
	Mary Murray Brown
	Zoe Owens
	Anna Linstrum
	Emily Devane
	Sallie Anderson
	Karen Jones
	Slawka G Scarso
	Ruth Clarke
	Máire T. Robinson
	Marie Gethins
	Joe Tuck
	Andrew Preskey
	Emily Rinkema
	Maureen Cullen
	Liz Houchin
	Jennifer McMahon
	Jay Mckenzie
	Rob Campbell
	Phoebe Hamilton-jones
	Fiona Mckay
	Katherine Marsh
	Marie-Louise Mcguinness
	John Bailey
	Emily Macdonald
	Ben Howels
	Ruth Guthrie
	Jane Fraser
	Debra A Daniels
	Emma Phillips
	Katie Oliver
	Pi James
	Mary Black
	Keren Heenan
	Jaime Gill
	Connor Donahue
	Rebekah McDermott
	Katie Piper
	Finola Cahill
	Joe Wedgbury
	Nini Parfitt
	Sam Jones

An update on key dates for the Bath Short Story Award.

The Longlist of 50 stories will be announced on 8th JULY.
The shortlist of 20 stories (published in our Anthology) will be announced on 25th JULY
The winners, chosen by our guest judge Sophie Haydock, will be announced on 1st AUGUST

Our 11th Award ends next Monday, 15th April and if you are a Last Minute writer, like I am when I enter competitons,now’s the time you might be looking over your story. Although I am a regular competition entrant, I don’t always attend to things I should before sending off the entry. Here’s a list for you to look through, if you are like me and would like some quick obvious reminders
Continue reading →

This will be my last post here for a while as our competition closes in two weeks and then it’s a busy reading period until the summer when we announce our longlist, shortlist and prize winners.
But today I’ve been thinking about not just why we write stories but some of the reasons we might feel what’s the point?

I’ve just come back from seeing The Human Body, by Lucy Kirkwood. I’ve loved her work previously, especially Chimerica which was utterly brilliant, but her latest ended up irritating me, the second act in particular. It’s always interesting to try and figure out why something jars or doesn’t land right, especially when you usually admire the writer, so I bought the script and read it and I will read it again. I’d thought at first it was because the slightly tragic but generic, sentimental love story took centre stage, away from the (to me more interesting) political theme (the founding of the NHS against a background of both apathy and antagonism, from doctors to housewives) and then, mulling on it later, I wondered if that was exactly her point and my frustration with the play was deliberately provoked. The focus on personal feelings/reactions/responsibilities drew attention away from a desperate need for reconstruction/equality/government and I was (rightly) annoyed by that. Continue reading →

We’re delighted to publish BSSA team member Jane Riekemann’s interview with award-winning author, screen writer, broadcaster and Booker Prize judge, Sara Collins, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019 with her best-selling novel  The Confessions of Frannie Langton. Sara’s brilliant short story, ‘Say You’ was a third-prize BSSA winner, way back in 2016 and two other of her superb stories have been shortlisted in our Awards; ‘Light Like You’, also in 2016 and ‘Lilith’ in 2015. The stories are published in our 2015 and 2016 anthologies which you can buy from Amazon. In this fascinating interview, among other things, Sara tells us about adapting her novel for the TV, her current writing projects and daily writing rituals and gives great advice for anyone thinking of entering BSSA 2024, which closes three weeks today, Monday, April 15th. Continue reading →

As short story writers, where do you find the best places to send your work? Social media platforms, the magazines and journals you read and competition listing sites of which there are many. Listing sites do seem to come and go and, when I was posting our award this year, I noticed that many we’ve used over the decade have folded. One that seems here to stay is Christopher Fielden’s website where you’ll find the BSSA listed under ‘Prestigious &/or Big Prize Competitions’
In addition to running the site, Chris is an award-winning and Amazon best-selling author, editor and blogger and runs his own short humorous story competition ‘To Hull and Back’ (more about that later). His short story collection, Book of the Bloodless Volume 1: Alternative Afterlives was published by Victorina Press and was a finalist in the ‘Fiction: Short Story’ category of the International Book Awards, sponsored by American Book Fest. It also won Author Shout’s Cover Wars. He also publishes thousands of writers’ stories in support of literary charities via his flash fiction writing challenges. Via the writing challenges, Chris compiled and edited a world record-breaking book. The 81 Words Flash Fiction Anthology  that contains 1,000 stories written by 1,000 authors. It won Best Anthology in the 2022 Saboteur Awards. He also manages to find time to run an email newsletter  that goes out once or twice a month. It’s currently free to sign up and gives regular details of writing competitions, guest posts by experienced writers / editors, details of new books that have been published by subscribers, and lots of other writing-related content.
I met Chris at an anthology launch in the days before Covid, when we held in-person events at Mr B’s Emporium in Bath and am pleased he was happy to share with us, in the following interview, his thoughts on short stories and those parts of the writing industry he knows so well. Continue reading →