The Best British Short Stories 2011

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).


Alan Beard has published two story collections, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don't Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). He has had numerous stories in magazines and anthologies, most recently in Digbeth Stories, Litro, Leon, trampset, Outside Left and Best Microfiction 2024. He is a longstanding member of Tindal Street Fiction Group, who celebrated their fortieth anniversary in 2023.


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.


John Burnside was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.


S.J. Butler is a freelance writer and editor living in Sussex. 'The Swimmer' is the first short story she has published.


Robert Edric is the author of some twenty novels including A New Ice Age, The Book of the Heathen, Gathering the Water and The London Satyr. A series of crime novels, The Song Cycle Trilogy, was set in Hull, close to the author's home in East Yorkshire.


Philip Langeskov was born in Copenhagen in 1976. In 2008, he received the David Higham Award. He has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, both from UEA. His stories have appeared in various places, including Bad Idea Magazine, Five Dials, Warwick Review and The Best British Short Stories 2011.


Heather Leach's short stories have appeared in Metropolitan, The Big Issue, The City Life Book of Manchester Stories, Northern Stories, Mslexia and elsewhere. She lives in Manchester and is co-editor and writer of two books on creative writing.


Kirsty Logan is an award-winning writer based in Scotland. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies all over the world, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, displayed in galleries, and translated into French, Japanese and Spanish. Kirsty has received fellowships from Hawthornden Castle and Brownsbank Cottage, and was the first writer-in-residence at West Dean College. She has previously worked as a bookseller, and is now a literary editor and freelance writer.


Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop in 1952. She is the author of ten novels, including Fludd, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall, as well as a collection, Learning to Talk: Short Stories, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She has won numerous prizes, among them the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and in 2006 was made a CBE.


Adam Marek won the 2011 Arts Foundation Fellowship in short story writing. His collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing, was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Prize, and in 2010 he was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. He lives in Bedfordshire with his wife and sons.


Claire Massey's fiction, poetry and articles have appeared in Cabinet des Fees, Enchanted Conversation, Flax, Rainy City Stories, Magpie Magazine and Brittle Star. She is founder and editor of New Fairy Tales. She lives in Lancashire with her husband and two young sons.


Bernie McGill was born in Northern Ireland and lives in Portstewart. 'No Angel' won second prize in both the Sean O Faolain Short Story Competition and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award. Her short fiction has been broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster and published in magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet, was published in the UK and Ireland in 2010.


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.


Michele Roberts is a poet, novelist and broadcaster. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize and is a winner of the WH Smith Literary award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is also a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Hertfordshire to a French mother and English father, Roberts now divides her time between London and Mayenne, France.


David Rose was born in 1949 and spent his working life in the Post Office. His debut story was published in the Literary Review (1989), since when he has been widely published in magazines in the UK and Canada. He was joint owner and fiction editor of Main Street Journal. He is the author of two novels, Vault (2011) and Meridian (2015) and one collection, Posthumous Stories (2013). Recent stories have appeared in Gorse.


Leone Ross is a novelist, short story writer and editor. Her fiction has been nominated for the Women's Prize, Goldsmiths Prize, RSL Ondjaate Prize and Edge Hill Prize, among others, and 'When We Went Gallivanting' won the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2022. She has taught creative writing for more than 20 years, and worked as a journalist throughout the 1990s. She is editor of Glimpse, the first Black British anthology of speculative fiction (Peepal Tree Press, 2022). Her third novel, This One Sky Day aka Popisho, is published in paperback by Faber & Faber and Picador USA. In 2023, she was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.


Lee Rourke is the author of the novel The Canal and the short story collection Everyday. A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction is forthcoming. He is Contributing Editor for 3:AM Magazine and also blogs at SPONGE! He lives in London.


Dai Vaughan, born in 1933, is a novelist and short story writer with a background in documentary filmmaking. He is the author of the novels The Cloud Chamber, Moritur, Totes Meer, Non-Return and The Treason of the Sparrows. His short stories are collected in Germs and his essays in For Documentary. He lives in north-west London.


Salley Vickers is the author of six novels, including Miss Garnet's Angel, Instances of the Number 3, The Other Side of You and Dancing Backwards, and a short story collection, Aphrodite's Hat. She has worked as a dancer, an artist's model, a university lecturer and a psychoanalyst. She now writes full-time and lives in London and Cambridge.