A huge thank you to everyone who entered this year’s Bristol Short Story Prize. We are extremely grateful for every single submission we received; thank you for sending your stories to us. A big thank you also goes to our readers for their enormous contribution to this year’s competition.
And it is with great pleasure that we announce this year’s BSSP longlist selected from the 2,178 stories we received. All judging decisions have been made and these are the 40 stories in the running for this year’s shortlist, anthology publication and top 3 prizes. Congratulations to the writers on the longlist – it’s a really wonderful achievement.
This year’s shortlist will be announced on this website on July 27th at 2pm (BST).
2022 Bristol Short Story Prize Longlist, listed A-Z by writer’s name:
Manifesto – Nathan Bailey
Cat Got Your Tongue – Leah Carter
Selkie – Sophie Develyn
Grey Unsilent Fragments – Angela Sangma Francis
Happy Ever After With Bear – Rosie Garland
Ghosts of the Wind River Valley – Paddy Gillies
Sunshine Beach – Lizzie Golds
Ruby Solitaire – Brad Gyori
Arranging Flowers – Josh Hallam
Sheriff’s Calls – Claire Harman
Skin – Christopher Harrisson
Oranges – Jim Hilton
Place Your Returns on the Trolley to Your Left – Sam Horton
Desperate Things – Elleanna Jenkins
Welcome to Otherhood – Yanjanani Kalaya
We are now Approaching Wellingborough – Helen Kennedy
Rivers – Sophia Khan
Lightning Girl – Elen Lewis
The Nudge – Anna Linstrum
Naanwai – Ananya Mahapatra
Unidentified Recurrent Incendiary Phenomenom – Oscar Martens
Ribs: Twig-Like – Charlotte McCormac
Girls and Boys – David Micklem
Salt Colonies – Shrutidhora P Mohor
Fray’s Desk – Padraig Murphy
Becoming – Kate O’Grady
Once – Jyoti Patel
Whatever Happened to Maggie – Nigel Pettman
Red Tide – Nola Poirier
A Cure for All Our Ills – Diana Powell
Unknown Territory – Sara Probst
Wimmy Road Boyz – Sufiyaan Salam
Still Life With Lemon – Rachel Sloan
OldFish – Johanna Spiers
Coconut – Kailash Srinivasan
Elision – Henry Stennett
Vivian Days – Dennis Tafoya
The Things We Did and Didn’t Do – Nora Thurkle
Finding Kevin – Fiona Ritchie Walker
The Walking King – Ellen Wiese
Notable Contenders (these stories were in the running for the longlist until the final decisions were made):
New from the Interior – Tammy Armstrong
The Bodhisattva’s Gift – Emmeline Chang
Provenance of the van der Meer Pyxis by Anonymous (Abridged) – Amanda Hildebrandt
American Hegemony – Phoebe Hurst
Lit and Left to Burn – Gaynor Jones
Drifting the White Line – James Martin Joyce
Mulier – Lauren Upton
Ivie’s Room – Claudia Vulliamy