Best British Short Stories 2021

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).


JULIA ARMFIELD is a fiction writer with a Master's in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. She lives and works in London. Her work has been published in Granta, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and Best British Short Stories 2019. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and was the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2018. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. Her debut collection, salt slow, was published by Picador in May 2019, and by Flatiron in the US. salt slow was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020 and was shortlisted for the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction 2020. Her story Longshore Drift won a Pushcart Prize in 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, will be published in 2022 by Picador and Flatiron.


AJ Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here which won Salt Publishing's Scott Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. She is the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes and a contributor to the mental health anthology What Doesn't Kill You (Unbound, 2020). She is currently working towards a PhD in creative writing at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk.


Iphgenia Baal is the author of The Hardy Tree (A Story About Gang Mentality), Gentle Art, Merced Es Benz, Death & Facebook and Man Hating Psycho.


Emma Bolland is an artist, writer and academic. She is co-editor at Gordian Projects and co-runs oHPo Radio at the Sheffield Institute of Arts, Sheffield Hallam University.


Tom Bromley is an author, editor, creative writing tutor and ghostwriter. His books include ten works of fiction and non-fiction under his own name, and a further fifteen ghostwritten titles, including prize-winners and bestsellers. He has taught novel writing for the Faber Academy since 2013, is Director of Fiction for the Professional Writing Academy and in 2017 founded the Salisbury Literary Festival. He writes a weekly column, 'Word Up', for various newspapers in Wiltshire and Hampshire, and reviews fiction for the regional Living Magazines. He lives in Salisbury.


Gary Budden is a writer, editor and co-founder of award-winning independent publisher, Influx Press. He is the author of London Incognita (Dead Ink, 2020), Hollow Shores (Dead Ink, 2017), the Shirley Jackson Award-shortlisted Judderman (Eden Book Society, 2018), and The White Heron Beneath the Reactor (2019) and These Towers Will One Day Slip Into the Sea (2021), with artist Maxim Griffin. He lives in Enfield, north London.


Jen Calleja is a writer and literary translator based in Hastings. In 2020, she published her first short story collection, I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For, with Prototype, and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize. She has translated over a dozen literary works from German, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 for her translation of Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands.


Robert Dewa has always written fiction, and in her twenties published three historical novels with Robert Hale. While studying for various degrees she published poetry and short fiction, including a first short story collection, Holding Stones (Pewter Rose Press, 2009). In 2013 she published a memoir, The Memory of Bridges, and a contemporary novel followed: The Esplanade (Weathervane Press, 2014). Since retiring from university teaching, she has been writing poetry and short stories again, and in November 2017 won the Willesden Herald prize with her story 'Dark Song'. Her first novella, The Flight of Marian Smith, was published in 2021.


John Foxx is a singer, musician, recording artist and graphic designer. A pioneer of electronic music in the UK, he was the original lead singer of Ultravox until leaving to pursue a long and successful solo career. His first collection of short stories, The Quiet Man (Rocket 88 Books), was published in 2020.


Josephine Galvin is a graduate of the Manchester Writing School's MA programme. Since she graduated, her short stories have been published in Fairlight Fiction, Storgy, Litro, Aesthetica, An Alien Invasion at the Pub: 2021 Anthology from Michael Terence Publishing (Michael Terence Publishing), The Manchester Review, Audio Arcadia, Lunate Fiction and The Invisible Collection (Nightjar Press). She lives in Manchester and works part-time for a biography agency. She is currently completing a collection of short fiction.


Uschi Gatward was born in Mile End, London. Her debut collection, English Magic, is published by Galley Beggar Press. Her stories have appeared in the anthologies Best British Short Stories 2015 and 2021 (Salt) and Resist: Stories of Uprising (Comma Press). They have been published widely in magazines including Dublin Review, Wasafiri and White Review. She died in 2021.


Meave Haughey is a short story writer based in Smethwick in the West Midlands. Recent stories have been published in Comma Press's The New Abject and Forecast: New Writing from Birmingham, Doestoevsky Wannabe's Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks and in Birmingham, from the Doestoevsky Wannabe Cities series.


Hilaire grew up in Melbourne and lives in London. She is co-author with Joolz Sparkes of the poetry collection London Undercurrents (Holland Park Press, 2019). Her collaboration with the artist Stephen Graham, indoors looking out (lower case press, 2020), features haiku and tanka written in response to lockdown. Short stories have also appeared in magazines including Meniscus and Under the Radar and in several anthologies. Her novel Hearts on Ice was published by Serpent's Tail in 2000.


Alice Jolly's most recent novel, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, was published in 2018 by Unbound. It was runner up for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She has won the Pen Ackerley Prize for memoir and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize for one of her short stories. She was awarded an O Henry Prize in 2021 and teaches creative writing at Oxford University.


Isha Karki is a PhD student based in London. Her short fiction has won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize, Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize and Mslexia Short Story Competition.


Yasmine Lever is an award-winning writer whose short stories have been published in several anthologies. She won the James Kirkwood Literary Award and has been among the Honorable Mentions in the Zoetrope Short Fiction Contest. As a playwright, her work has been performed in London and New York. Her play Remember the Future was longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize. Several other plays have reached competition shortlists and she has been accepted onto several fellowship schemes and residencies in London and New York. She is completing her MFA at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is writing her first novel.


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.


Mel Pryor is a poet and short fiction writer. Her work has been widely published, including in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Ambit and Mslexia. Her poetry is anthologised in Some Cannot be Caught (Emma Press) and Writing Motherhood (Seren) and is forthcoming in Poems of Books and Libraries (Penguin Random House). She won the 2015 Philip Larkin Poetry Prize and has been the Scottish Poetry Library digital poet in residence. Her poetry collection Small Nuclear Family (Eyewear) was published in 2015. @melpryorpoetry


Douglas Thompson's short stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including Ambit, Albedo One, Chapman and New Writing Scotland. Variously classed as a weird, horror, science fiction, literary, or historical novelist, he has produced 14 novels and collections of short stories and poetry since 2009, with various publishers in Britain, Europe and America. His novellas, The Drowned Labyrinth and Dreams of a Dead Country will be published in Portuguese and German by Raphus of Sao Paulo and Nighttrain of Darmstadt respectively, in 2022. His latest novels, The Suicide Machine and Barking Circus are available in paperback from Zagava of Dusseldorf.


Matthew Turner is a senior lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts. His essays, reviews and short stories have been published in Financial Times, Architectural Review, Art Review, Frieze, Gorse and elsewhere. In 2021 his first book, Loom, a story about threads and hidden wealth, was published by Gordian Projects.