Bristol Short Story Prize: The Winners
Bristol Short Story Prize: The Winners
Ships late June.
Collected together for the first time, here are the winning stories from the first 16 years of the Bristol Short Story Prize. As the competition gets set to move to a new home, this is a celebration of the standout writers and stories from BSSP’s first decade and a half, and a toast to its future.
All profits from the sale of the anthology will be donated to Doctors Without Borders and Borderlands, a refugee charity based in Bristol.
Winning authors include…
Dima Alzayat, winner of the 2017 BSSP was signed by Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedman, a judge for the competition that year. Her debut short story collection, Alligator and Other Stories (2020), was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
2011 BSSP winner, Emily Bullock, was discovered by literary agent Ed Wilson in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 4. Her debut novel, The Longest Fight (2015), was shortlisted for the Cross Sports Book Awards. Her second novel, Inside the Beautiful Inside was published in 2020, and her collection of short stories, Human Terrain (2021) was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.
Mahsuda Snaith, the winner of the 2014 Bristol Short Story Prize, had her debut novel, The Things We Thought We Knew published in 2017, and her second, How to Find Home (2019) was chosen as a BBC Radio 4 'Book at Bedtime'.
2019 BSSP winner, Cameron Stewart, had his debut novel, Why Do Horses Run? published by Allen & Unwin, Australia in April 2024.
Dizz Tate won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2018. Her debut novel, Brutes, was published in 2023 by Faber in the UK and Catapult in the US to widespread acclaim. 2015 BSSP winner, Brent van Staalduinen has subsequently had the novels Saints, Unexpected (2016) Boy (2021) Nothing But Life (2022) and Unthinkable (2024), as well as the short story collection, Cut Road (2022) published after his BSSP triumph.
