Best British Short Stories 2024

The Best British Short Stories #13

by Nicholas Royle (Editor ), Alan Beard, Kevin Boniface

The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its fourteenth year

Best British Short Stories 2024 showcases an excellent and varied selection of stories, by British writers, first published during 2023 in magazines, journals, anthologies, collections, chapbooks and online.

‘If the latest iteration of Salt’s Best British Short Stories collection is anything to go by then the genre remains in safe hands.’ —Lawrence Foley, TLS

Featuring stories by: Alan Beard, Kevin Boniface, Paul Brownsey, Claire Carroll, ECM Cheung, Jonathan Coe, Rosie Garland, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Timothy Jarvis, Cynan Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Sonya Moor, Alison Moore, Gregory Norminton, Nicholas Royle, Cherise Saywell, Kamila Shamsie, Ben Tufnell, Charlotte Turnbull and Cate West.

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2024

About the author

Nicholas Royle is an English writer. He is the author of seven novels, two novellas and a short story collection. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He works as a fiction reviewer for The Independent and the Warwick Review and as an editor for Salt Publishing.

Reviews

[Richard Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This year's BBSS starts out disappointingly - there is a preponderance of points of view with depression related mental health issues. This isn't surprising at a point in time when writers will have been busy processing covid and its aftermath but it lends a grey, monochrome feeling to the collection. I wonder if the not-uninteresting Alison Moore should give up the third person: not for the first time, I sense a hideous omniscient narrative voice between author and reader, shrieking with sadistic laughter at her characters' terrible misfortunes. If this is not an effect Moore desires, it's past time she gave her malevolent third person the boot. However, old favourites Jonathan Coe and Kerry Hadley Pryce don't disappoint - they never do - and Rosie Garland and Gregory Norminton are a couple of names I'll want to check out further.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in this fab collection so am biased, but these stories hit the spot: some moving, some experimental, some beautiful. I had read a few in online mags and collections and one (The Sun is Only a Shipwreck Insofar as a Woman's Body Resembles It) I had the privilege to hear read aloud by the author (Claire Carrol) at Mo Stories, a monthly story night at The Old Moseley Arms in Birmingham (UK). I'm proud and delighted to be among such names as Jonathan Coe, Cynan Jones, Kamilie Shamsie and other up and coming writers. Buy it for Christmas.