The Best British Short Stories 2011

Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or more accurately, by its title. 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 web sites, 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. The first book of the series includes stories published in 2010 by the following authors: David Rose, Hilary Mantel, Lee Rourke, Leone Ross, Claire Massey, Christopher Burns, Adam Marek, SJ Butler, Heather Leach, Alan Beard, Kirsty Logan, Philip Langeskov, Bernie McGill, John Burnside, Robert Edric, Michèle Roberts, Dai Vaughan, Alison Moore and Salley Vickers.

Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of seven novels, including: Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, and First Novel, and a short story collection, Mortality. He has edited sixteen anthologies, including A Book of Two Halves and Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing. He lives between London and Manchester and teaches creative writing at MMU. Alan Beard is the author of two short story collections, Taking Doreen out of the Sky and You Don't Have to Say. He edited Going the Distance, an anthology celebrating twenty years of the Tindal Street Fiction Group, and had a story included in Best Short Stories 1991. Married with two children, he lives and works in Birmingham. Christopher Burns is the author of five novels, including The Condition of Ice and Dust Raising, and a short story collection, About the Body. A new novel, A Division of the Light, will be published in 2012. He lives with his wife 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. Robert Edric is the author of some twenty novels including A New Ice Age, The Book of the Heathen, Gathering the Water and The London Satyr. A series of crime novels, The Song Cycle Trilogy, was set in Hull, close to the author's home in East Yorkshire. Philip Langeskov was born in Copenhagen in 1976. In 2008, he received the David Higham Award. He has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, both from UEA. His stories have appeared in various places, including Bad Idea Magazine, Five Dials, Warwick Review and The Best British Short Stories 2011. Heather Leach's short stories have appeared in Metropolitan, The Big Issue, The City Life Book of Manchester Stories, Northern Stories, Mslexia and elsewhere. She lives in Manchester and is co-editor and writer of two books on creative writing. Kirsty Logan is an award-winning writer based in Scotland. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies all over the world, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, displayed in galleries, and translated into French, Japanese and Spanish. Kirsty has received fellowships from Hawthornden Castle and Brownsbank Cottage, and was the first writer-in-residence at West Dean College. She has previously worked as a bookseller, and is now a literary editor and freelance writer. Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop in 1952. She is the author of ten novels, including Fludd, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall, as well as a collection, Learning to Talk: Short Stories, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She has won numerous prizes, among them the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and in 2006 was made a CBE. Adam Marek won the 2011 Arts Foundation Fellowship in short story writing. His collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing, was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Prize, and in 2010 he was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. He lives in Bedfordshire with his wife and sons. Claire Massey's fiction, poetry and articles have appeared in Cabinet des Fees, Enchanted Conversation, Flax, Rainy City Stories, Magpie Magazine and Brittle Star. She is founder and editor of New Fairy Tales. She lives in Lancashire with her husband and two young sons. Bernie McGill was born in Northern Ireland and lives in Portstewart. 'No Angel' won second prize in both the Sean O Faolain Short Story Competition and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award. Her short fiction has been broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster and published in magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet, was published in the UK and Ireland in 2010. Alison Moore's first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Her shorter fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur. Michele Roberts is a poet, novelist and broadcaster. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize and is a winner of the WH Smith Literary award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is also a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Hertfordshire to a French mother and English father, Roberts now divides her time between London and Mayenne, France. David Rose was born in 1949, living outside West London, between Windsor and Richmond. He spent his working life in the Post Office. His debut story was published in The Literary Review, and since then, has been widely published in small presses in the U.K. and Canada. He is joint owner and Fiction Editor of Main Street Journal. Leone Ross is a Jamaican/British award-winning writer, editor and lecturer. She is the author of two novels, All the Blood is Red (Angela Royal Publishing) and Orange Laughter (Anchor), and numerous short stories. She won an Arts Council award in 2001, and, in 2013, her short story collection, now entitled Come Let Us Sing Anyway, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize. She works as a senior lecturer at the University of Roehampton in London and her third novel, This One Sky Day, is forthcoming. Her website is at www.leoneross.com. Lee Rourke is the author of the novel The Canal and the short story collection Everyday. A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction is forthcoming. He is Contributing Editor for 3:AM Magazine and also blogs at SPONGE! He lives in London. Dai Vaughan, born in 1933, is a novelist and short story writer with a background in documentary filmmaking. He is the author of the novels The Cloud Chamber, Moritur, Totes Meer, Non-Return and The Treason of the Sparrows. His short stories are collected in Germs and his essays in For Documentary. He lives in north-west London. Salley Vickers is the author of six novels, including Miss Garnet's Angel, Instances of the Number 3, The Other Side of You and Dancing Backwards, and a short story collection, Aphrodite's Hat. She has worked as a dancer, an artist's model, a university lecturer and a psychoanalyst. She now writes full-time and lives in London and Cambridge.