An exciting new series bringing together the best short stories published by British writers during the last year. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and websites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. Neither genre nor Granta shall be overlooked in the search for the very best new short fiction.
is the author of six short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and Paris Fantastique – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also 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, which continues to publish original short stories in the form of limited-edition chapbooks. He lives in Manchester and London.
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.
