Just under 1000 entries were submitted to the 2022 Award and we thank our dedicated and enthusiastic group of initial readers for helping the team arrive at a longlist of fifty. From there it was a difficult task for us to find the shortlist of twenty brilliant stories which we sent to our final judge, writer, editor and teacher, Paul McVeigh Thank you very much to him for making his selections and for his comments below. The BSSA team’s comments on the stories selected for The Acorn Award for an unpublished writer of fiction and The Local Prize are also included at the end of Paul’s report. We’re looking forward to reading all the winning and shortlisted stories in print in our ninth paperback anthology, which will be launched in November, 2022.
Judge’s Comments by Paul McVeigh
When judging, I read all the stories and then re-read those I have shortlisted from the original shortlist. At this point a number of the stories could win (in fact, on different days there’s often a different winner) and you are reading to whittle down further. Then a story stands out, in this case ‘Dead Dog’, because it actually gets better with each read. The 2022 shortlist was strong. It speaks to the reputation of the Bath Short Story Prize that the stories had such variety in genre, plot and style with impressive quality and I very much enjoyed reading them.
‘Dead Dog’, the first prize, is such an accomplished story it had me intrigued as to who the author was. I wanted to hear their story. ‘Dead Dog’ is at times absurd and darkly funny and, at others, moving and thoughtful. Some stories start strong then fade but ‘Dead Dog’ sustains surprise right up until the end. The author does an impressive job of threading a number of strands and tones into one tight tale. I will read it again.
‘The Ghosts That Dance Between Us’, the second prize, is haunting, mysterious and wise. It has sentences that read like lines of poetry. The story conjures a strange world and transports you into it. I’m drawn to stories where I have to think, where I have to work out what’s happening, I love that relationship with the author. I can’t say for sure that I understood the story completely but that drew me into it further. It is a story that has stayed with me and I think it will stay with you too.
‘Stick People’, the third prize, manages to bring us back to the millenium NYE, take us to India and its (in)famous train experience, while capturing accurately the strain on a young couple travelling together. We discover that this strain is more than just the irritation of tired travellers, there is heartbreaking loss at its core. A story so believably rendered.
Commended: I loved the voice of the narrator in ‘Nobody Believes a Woman Named Joanne’. I loved the rawness, the emotional register of the character – so strong yet so vulnerable.
Commended: ‘Indian Tree’. I commended this because the first half of the story is really quite something. It manages an extremely difficult thing, which is to descibe the impact of a bomb, capturing all its horror. The author makes it seem so real and spares us none of the gore and human destruction.
BSSA Team Comments:
The Acorn Award for an Unpublished Writer of Fiction: ‘Acts of Love on the 17.22 from Bristol Temple Meads’
We warmed to Iris, a ticket collector who looks out for her commuters, at the heart of this satisfying character-driven story. Told from multiple viewpoints, the passenger’s relationships and Iris’s backstory are revealed through a clever relay of overlapping and sometimes contradictory observations, as the train speeds along.
Local Prize: ‘Starling Boy’
What an exuberant and original use of language, with echoes of the beat poets and Dylan Thomas. This story hurtles along but, at its core, is the sad tale of a young lad and his alcoholic mother – all the more poignant when buried in an explosion of the sights and sounds of school life.
Emily Devane is a writer, editor and teacher from Ilkley, West Yorkshire. Her first print publication was the Bath Short Story Award anthology, 2015. Since then, her work has been widely published, most recently in Ambit and Janus Literary. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Word Factory Apprenticeship and a Northern Writers’ Award. Her story ‘The Last King of Connemaidh’ was one of four pieces shortlisted for The Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing, 2022. Emily teaches creative writing workshops (@wordsmoor), co-hosts Word Factory’s Strike! Short Story Club, and is a founding editor at FlashBack Fiction
Emer Hoare worked for many years as a television creative in documentary and current affairs programming. She has recently completed an MA in creative writing at The Open University, graduating earlier this year. In 2021 she was longlisted in the Irish Writer’s Centre Novel Fair. Emer has been working hard on her writing and is pure delighted to have a story in the anthology. She lives in Dublin with her family.
Elizabeth Cooke has been writing for over thirty years and has sixteen published books encompassing both fiction and non fiction. She has just finished an account of a scandalous relationship in Georgian England, research for which took her all over England. She has also completed her next novel – a slow-burn thriller. She lives in Dorset close to the sea.
Anna Dempsey is an American-born writer and teacher based in London. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative Writing/Creative Grieving at Bath Spa University. She won the 2019 Costa Short Story Award and has been published by Dear Damsels, Popshot, Litro and Ellipsis Zine.
David Abbott lives up a hill just outside of Abergavenny in Wales with his boyfriend and a rescue dog called Roxy. He is a one-time resident of Bath and a very occasional writer of fiction.
Jenny Tunstall is a short story writer currently living in North Somerset. She spent many years working in academic publishing, having previously computer modelled urban traffic congestion and sold postcards on Bournemouth pier. She distracts herself from writing by walking local footpaths, singing sea shanties with friends on the beach and haunting second-hand book shops. She lived in Montreal for several years and was shortlisted in the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) Literary Awards. She won the Home-Start Bridgwater Short Story Prize, placed second in the Saki Short Story Competition and has recently had a short story published in Mslexia.
In terms of writing, I think this is excellent advice. Do you wait for the perfect time, or place, or circumstance, thinking that once all your ducks are in a row, THEN you will write the perfect story? I do, especially when my confidence is low and/or the world is overwhelming (ok, nearly all the time). So, if the neighbour’s dog is driving me crazy (he doesn’t, he’s lovely, but some days I can’t filter out the occasional barking) I blame that for the fact my writing feels rubbish and I didn’t meet my goals or start the story that’s in my head or finish the one I began a few weeks ago. And the more excuses I find, the less inclined I am to sit down and write. I go downhill fast, lose a day, a few days, a week or two. Oh no! I’m a failure, but how can I be expected to be a creative genius in these (insert your own bugbears) conditions? Sound familiar? If not, well done! If yes, read on 🙂 
We like to hear about previous prize winners’ successes. Hilary Taylor won third prize in BSSA 2018 with her story ‘Sea Defences’ and her story is published in our BSSA 2018 anthology. In this interview she tells us how she extended this prize winning short fiction into a novel with the same title, which will be published by Lightning Press on January 15th 2023. Congratulations Hilary! We also learn how she discovered her short story ‘Sea Defences’ online, analysed for an exam syllabus. A multi-genre writer, Hilary was recently a winner in the Flash 500 flash fiction contest and there’s a link to the story for you to read. She’s also given great advice for editing final short story drafts if you are thinking of entering this year’s Award.