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 The BSSA team’s comments on the stories selected for The Acorn Award for an unpublished writer of fiction and The Local Prize are also included at the end of Paul’s report.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.

Congratulations to all the BSSA 2022 shortlisted writers, listed here in alphabetical order. In his general remarks, our shortlist judge Paul McVeigh said:
“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.”

The 2022 anthology will be out in paperback and available from our publisher adhocfiction.com  and from Amazon in November, this year.

Lucy Bignall

Lucy Bignall, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘Ham’s Place’, was born in Zambia and grew up in Liberia, England and Saudi Arabia, before emigrating to Australia as an adult, where she lived for fifteen years. Now living in a hairy house in Darkest Buckinghamshire, she works as a violinist. teacher and choir leader and writes as much as possible. She has won 1st place in the Henshaw Press, Yeovil Literary Festival and Writer’s Forum competitions and been placed in many others, as well as being shortlisted for the Fish Memoir prize. She is currently seeking representation for a supernatural novel.

David Butler

David Butler wrote the shortlisted story ‘Hidden’. His second short story collection, Fugitive (Arlen House), and third poetry collection, Liffey Sequence (Doire Press), were both published in 2021. His third novel, City of Dis (New Island), was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, 2015.

Clare Chandler

Clare Chandler, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘Your Bed’ worked in publishing and government comms among other things, before moving to Cornwall. She now writes full-time and her published work includes plays (notably performed at the Edinburgh Festival); journalism (mags, websites and newspapers including pieces for the Guardian); short stories (various finalists for prizes including the Costa Short Story Award); and eighteen educational books. She is presently working on a book which blends nature writing and memoir with the story of a very short journey.

Michelle Christophorou

Michelle Christophorou who wrote the shortlisted story ‘The Making of Koupepia’ was born in Lancashire to a Liverpudlian mother and Greek Cypriot father. She now lives in Surrey. She is the author of novella-in-flash, Kipris (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), which features characters from ‘The Making of Koupepia’ (names were initially changed in order to enter the short story competition). Her short fiction has appeared in various places in print and online, and her story ‘Wearing You’ (published in National Flash Fiction Day’s FlashFlood journal) was included in the BIFFY 50 list of best UK and Irish flash 2019/20. Find out more at www.michellechristophorou.co.uk, or on Twitter @MAChristophorou.

Kate Coffey

Kate Coffey who wrote the shortlisted story ‘Bird of Paradise’ was shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award in 2020 and has been published in New Writing Scotland and Mslexia. This story is taken from a collection of shorts she wrote whilst on the creative writing programme at New Writing South in Brighton. She has just completed her first novel.

Jane Dugdale

Jane Dugdale who wrote the shortlisted story ‘All that Remains is Hope’ is a researcher and writer. A graduate of the Birkbeck MA in Creative Writing, she is currently working on a collection of fantastical short stories and can be found on Twitter @janeannedugdale.

Gilli Fryzer

Gilli Fryzer, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘After the Good Shepherd’s Laundry, Buffalo’, has been published in short story anthologies, print magazines, and online, and performed live. Her story ‘A Kindness’ won the Mslexia Short Story Prize 2020, and was included in Sagenhafte Geschichten, a German anthology of contemporary European tales. Her dystopian folk tale ‘Corn Running’ was chosen by Zoe Gilbert as the winner of the 2019 MIR Summer Festival. One of the London Library’s selected cohort of emerging writers, Gilli works from a salvaged shepherd’s hut in the corner of a Kentish field.
www.gillistories.com
Twitter @GilliFryzer

Edward Hogan

Edward Hogan who wrote the shortlisted story ‘The Greenland Shark’ is from Derby. He has worked in libraries and colleges, and he is now a lecturer at the Open University. His novels include The Electric, and Blackmoor. Ed’s recent short stories have been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Prize. His story ‘Single Sit’ won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2021. He lives in Brighton.

Natalie 0’Keeffe

Natalie O’Keeffe, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘Becoming a Ninja, 1997’, was born and (mostly) raised in Birmingham before she moved to the Scottish Highlands. Her stories typically explore issues of identity, memory, and liminality. She is currently working on her first novel. Find her on twitter: @im_nat_ok

Kerry Jewell

Kerry Jewell, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘The Ant House’ is a writer and nuclear medicine registrar, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. In 2020 she was shortlisted for The Richell Prize for emerging writers. Her short fiction has since been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia and New Zealand. She is currently working on her debut novel, Meddies.

Karen Jones

Karen Jones, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘Don’t Step on the Cracks’, is from Glasgow, Scotland. Her flashes have been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize, and her story ‘Small Mercies’ was included in Best Small Fictions 2019. In 2021, she won first prize in the Cambridge Flash Prize, Flash 500 and Reflex Fiction and was shortlisted for To Hull and Back, Bath Flash Fiction and Bath Short Story Award. Her novella-in-flash When It’s Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She is Special Features Editor at New Flash Fiction Review and an editor for National Flash Fiction Day anthology.

Debra Waters

Debra Waters, who wrote the shortlisted story ‘We are Nothing More than Birds’, is a lifestyle journalist and a writer of short stories, memoir and flash fiction. She studied Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. In 2020, she won The Bridport Short Story Prize for ‘Oh Hululu’. She’s been shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Award, the Wells Festival of Literature Short Story Prize, the Exeter Short Story Prize and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Fish Publishing’s Flash Fiction Prize and the Reflex Flash Fiction Competition. She lives in Brighton with her husband and son.

Kate Wilson

Kate Wilson who wrote the shortlisted story, ‘Yellow Rose Fever’, graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter in 2021. She was selected to take part in a workshop series with Anna Maria Murphy at The Writers’ Block in Cornwall and commissioned to write a short story for their podcast series ‘Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups’ which was broadcast in February. She is a mentee on the inaugural Word Space programme for emerging south west writers run by Literature Works. ‘Yellow Rose Fever’ is her first published story.

photo by Chris Knight on
Unsplash

For those last minute writers thinking of entering our 9th award, I’m going to stretch metaphor to its limits and ask you to get under the bonnet of your story.
Yes, if your story was a car, you need to undertake some maintenance before it sets off on its extensive journey via our BSSA readers and hopefully to a winning destination. Continue reading →