Best British Short Stories 2025

Name: Best British Short Stories 2025
Brand: Salt Publishing
Price: 10.55 EUR
Availability: OnlineOnly

David Bevan Rose Biggin Christopher Burns Ian Critchley Pippa Goldschmidt Linden Hibbert Hannah Hoare Catrin Kean Roger Luckhurst(Autor*in)

Salt Publishing

1. Auflage

Erscheint ca. am 13. Oktober 2025

224 Seiten

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978-1-78463-354-7 (ISBN)

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Beschreibung

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Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections - Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny - and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited thirty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in chapbook format. Forthcoming, from Confingo Publishing, is Paris Fantastique, and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books (Salt).

David Bevan is a 2021 graduate of the Manchester Writing School's Creative Writing MA programme. 'The Bull' is one of two stories first published by Nightjar Press.

Christopher Burns is the author of six novels - Snakewrist, The Flint Bed, In the Houses of the West, The Condition of Ice, Dust Raising and A Division of the Light - and a short story collection, About the Body. He lives in Whitehaven, West Cumbria.

Linden Hibbert runs a pop-up art gallery in rural Suffolk. She has a PhD in creative writing from UEA, and is currently researching the adaptation of Ovidian myths from poetry to sculpture. Her short stories have been published by the Baltimore Review, and the Madrid Review, among others.

Hannah Hoare is a television producer, director and scriptwriter specialising in natural history programmes. Her short fiction has been published online by The Molotov Cocktail, Flashback Fiction, The Cabinet of Heed and Thin Skin. She lives in Wiltshire, in southern England.

Baret Magarian was born in London, of Armenian origin. He was educated at Durham and London Universities and has published The Fabrications, Melting Point, Mirror and Silhouette and Chattering. He is a lecturer, pianist-composer, amateur painter, guitarist, writer and poet. He has travelled widely and has worked as nude model, translator, musician, interviewer, journalist, book representative, and in PR.

Wyl Menmuir is a novelist and editor based in Cornwall. His bestselling debut novel, The Many (Salt), was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. In November 2016, Nightjar Press published a limited-edition chapbook of his story Rounds and in 2017, the National Trust published his story, In Dark Places. He has written for Kneehigh Theatre, Radio 4's Open Book, the Guardian and the Observer, and is a regular contributor to the journal Elementum. He teaches creative writing at Falmouth University and is co-creator of Cornish writing centre The Writers' Block.

Alison Moore's first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning 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. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.

Okechukwu Nzelu's debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. His second novel, Here Again Now, was published in 2022. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Lancaster University.

Simon Okotie is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, In the Absence of Absalon and After Absalon, an acclaimed trilogy of novels published by Salt. In the Absence of Absalon was longlisted for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize. His work has appeared in FT Weekend and Gorse, and at 3:AM Magazine and The White Review. Two Degrees of Freedom, a short story, is published by Nightjar Press.

CD Rose is the author of Who's Who When Everyone is Someone Else and the editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure. His short fiction has appeared in 3:AM, Gorse, Lighthouse and The Lonely Crowd.

Elizabeth Stott was born in Kent and has lived in the north of England for most of her life. Her fiction and poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies, also as a collection of stories - Familiar Possessions. Her poetry pamphlet - The Undoing - was published in 2023 by Maytree Press. Most recently, her stories have appeared in Confingo Magazine and Mslexia and featured at a Liars' League spoken-word event.

Mark Valentine is from Northampton but now lives in Yorkshire. He is the author of studies of Arthur Machen (1995) and the diplomat and fantasist Sarban (2010). His short stories are published by the independent imprints Tartarus Press (UK), The Swan River Press (Ireland), Sarob Press (France) and Zagava (Germany). He also writes essays on book-collecting and forgotten authors.

is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. Her novels have won a Jerwood Award, the British Library Hay Festival Prize, and been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Historical Writers Golden Crown. Her debut story collection is This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which includes the 2023 BBC National Short Story Prize winner, 'Comorbidities'. Her interests are complicated femininity and transgressive motherhood, especially in the modern workplace. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Autor*in

Reihen-Herausgeber

Inhalt

NICHOLAS ROYLE

Introduction

This is the fifteenth volume of Best British Short Stories. To mark the occasion, here are fifteen lists that pertain, in one way or another, to the short story.

Fifteen UK publishers that aren't afraid of short stories

British Library Publishing

CB editions

Comma Press

Confingo Publishing

Dead Ink Books

Faber & Faber

Fitzcarraldo Editions

Fly on the Wall Press

Galley Beggar Press

Influx Press

Jacaranda Books

Nightjar Press

Peepal Tree Press

Salt Publishing

Scratch Books

Fourteen UK print literary magazines that publish short stories

Confingo

Extra Teeth

Granta

Gutter

Lighthouse

London Magazine

New Welsh Review

Open Pen

Remains

Seaside Gothic

Shooter

Stand

Tears in the Fence

Wasafiri

Thirteen writers best known for their short fiction

Robert Aickman

Jorge Luis Borges

Ray Bradbury

Raymond Carver

Julio Cortazar

Roald Dahl

Lydia Davis

Shirley Jackson

Franz Kafka

Katherine Mansfield

Alice Munro

Edgar Allan Poe

Saki

Twelve individuals who do a great deal to support the short story in the UK (with apologies to those people whose names will come to me only when it's too late)

Jess Chandler, publisher Prototype Publishing

Ailsa Cox, founder Edge Hill Prize

Jonny Davidson, production editor British Library

David Gaffney, author, deviser short fiction projects

Cathy Galvin, founder Word Factory

Jonathan Gibbs, author, creator A Personal Anthology

Dominic Jaeckle, author, publisher

Johnny Mains, anthologist, author, genre researcher

Alberto Manguel, author, critic, anthologist

Chris Power, short story writer, critic, broadcaster

Amanda Saint, founder Retreat West

Tony White, author, founder Piece of Paper Press

Eleven great films based on short stories

Don't Look Now

Rear Window Blow-up

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

They Live

The Swimmer

The Birds

Minority Report

Total Recall

Memento

Ten short story collections published by Picador, 1972-1999

Alan Beard, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969

Rebecca Brown, The Terrible Girls

Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants

MJ Fitzgerald, Ropedancer

Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River

Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites

Bridget O'Connor, Here Comes John

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

Nine short story anthologies published by Picador 1972-2001 with the caveat that some of these include novel extracts

Dermot Bolger, The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction

Amit Chaudhuri, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature

Carolyn Choa & David Su Li-qun, The Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction

Clifton Fadiman, The World of the Short Story

Frederick R Karl & Leo Hamalian, The Naked i

Patrick McGrath & Bradford Morrow, The New Gothic

Peter Kravitz, The Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction

George Lamming, Cannon Shot and Glass Beads

Alberto Manguel, Black Water

Eight random notes

Hats off to Extra Teeth, the only UK literary magazine, possibly the only literary magazine anywhere, to employ a vibe consultant. In fact, Nyla Ahmad is described on the Extra Teeth website as both 'vibe consultant' and 'vibes consultant'. So, which is correct? I asked the question. On social media, the response came back: 'Both are correct! Vibes is used when consulting on the multiple different vibes of a person, place or thing, whereas vibe relates to the general overall impression.' I'm now wondering if Best British Short Stories needs a vibe - or vibes - consultant and, if so, who it should be.
Since the publication of Best British Short Stories 2024, three readers have contacted me, to say they liked my story reprinted in that volume. I explained to them that I was not the author of 'Strangers Meet We When' by Nicholas Royle, taken from David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine, by Nicholas Royle; that it was the work of the author I call the other Nicholas Royle; that he and I are two different authors; that he even suggested adding a note to his biographical note explaining all of this, but I decided against it, perhaps unwisely. What could or should I have done differently so that readers would not think that I had committed the ultimate act of vanity and narcissism, as an editor, by selecting a story of my own to be included in a book with the word 'best' in its title? Should I have included that explanatory line in Royle's biog note? Does anyone read biog notes? My thinking was that anyone who thought I had included a story of my own had only to read Royle-the-author's biog note and Royle-the-editor's biog note and they would see that these were two different writers. This was naïve of me and so I decided to write about the issue in this introduction for the record. What, then, should an editor do? I felt that his story deserved to be picked. Should I have not picked it, simply because we write under the same name? Should the Writers Guild or the Society of Authors have a rule stipulating that there may not be two authors with the same name, that the newcomer should come up with a new name, as Equity demands of actors? Royle published his first book - Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1990) - before I published either the first anthology I edited, Darklands (1991), or my first novel, Counterparts (1993). How would I have reacted had I been obliged to come up with a different name? I would not have been pleased. And now that I think about it, I had been publishing short stories, in magazines and anthologies, under what I regarded as my own name, since 1984, some of which I forwarded, precociously, to Giles Gordon in the hope that he and David Hughes might select one of them for their series, Best Short Stories, which they never did. Indeed, as I have written in one of these introductions before, so I'm sorry to repeat myself, but it is a story told at my own expense, Gordon eventually wrote to ask me, in the gentlest, politest, but still quite a direct way, to desist. 'In truth your stories just don't appeal sufficiently to us,' he wrote. 'They are certainly most competent but they don't, for us, sing out with the necessary individuality and voice. I'd suggest that in future we contact you if we see a story of yours which appeals rather than your going to the trouble of sending stories to us.' My name did appear in the introduction to Best Short Stories 1992, when the editors acknowledged Darklands, from which they reprinted Stephen Gallagher's 'The Visitors' Book'. Gordon and Hughes wrote, 'Above all we congratulate Nicholas Royle, himself a prolific short-story writer, for editing and publishing the first of what he intends as a regular visitor to the scene, based on his belief that good writers of horror were missing out. We might easily, had space allowed, have fallen for more of his choices than Stephen Gallagher's restrained treat of a ghost story.' My stories since have been reprinted in anthologies containing the word 'best' in their title, but they were selected by the editors of those series (Karl Edward Wagner, Stephen Jones, Ellen Datlow and...

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