We are delighted to introduce the other ten writers who are on this year’s BSSP shortlist and in the running for the top prize. Their stories will be published in our 14th anthology on October 9th.
Kate Lockwood Jefford grew up in Cardiff, obsessed with books and cartwheels. She worked in the NHS and student mental health services – alongside a stint writing and performing stand-up comedy – before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She won the 2020 VS Pritchett Prize and the 2021 Bath Short Story Award. Her work appears in Prospect magazine, MIR online, Brick Lane Bookshop Longlist (3rd prize 2020) and is forthcoming in Fish Publishing & Rhys Davies Award anthologies (2021) and 100 Voices (Unbound, 2022). She’s working on her first collection of stories, supported by a grant from Arts Council England.
Vijay Khurana is a fiction writer and translator from German. He won the 2021 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition, and his stories have been short or longlisted for numerous other prizes, including the Desperate Literature Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and the Cúirt New Writing Prize. His fiction is forthcoming in NOON (US) and The Griffith Review (Australia). Vijay has also been a presenter on Australian radio station triple j, and in 2014 he published a children’s chapter book, Regal Beagle.
Blaine Newton is an award-winning playwright with an audience of well under a million people. When not bragging about himself in the third person, he has written monologues for radio shows you’ve never heard and short stories for magazines you’ve never read. Blaine lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, far enough north that on occasion the crackling of the aurora borealis will wake him from his writing-induced stupor.
Amanda Ong (she/her) is a writer from California currently based in Seattle, USA. She graduated from Columbia University in 2020 cum laude with degrees in Creative Writing and Ethnicity and Race Studies. There, Amanda was the recipient of Departmental Honors and the Center for Ethnicity and Race Studies’ Award for Academic Excellence. Concepts of oral history, material culture, subjectivity, and radical justice are consistent influences in her writing. College campus literary magazines aside, Sifters is her first published short story, and she could not be more delighted.
Ajay Patri is a lawyer by training and has worked in a law firm and a think-tank in the past. Earlier this year, he was selected by the South Asia Speaks Mentorship Program, as part of which he is working alongside Madhuri Vijay, the author of The Far Field, on his first novel. He lives with his wife in Bangalore, India.
Annie Q. Syed is a reader and writer who teaches full time. Her novel was a runner-up for the Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair 2021 and the Blue Pencil Agency’s 2020 Pitch Prize. Her essays and fiction have appeared in The Common Breath, Zeno Press, The Fiddlehead, The Honest Ulsterman, Tahoma Literary Review, Afreada, and in Bath Flash Fiction and Reflex Fiction anthologies. Sometimes she blogs and shares photos at www.anniesyed.com.
Sarah Tinsley is a UK writer living in France who writes fiction and non-fiction. She’s drawn to exploring gender issues and helping others explore their creative selves. Her first novel won the Spread the Word/Bookouture competition in 2020 and is due to be released in January 2022. Her short fiction has been published widely, including in Mslexia and Litro and she has an MA in Creative Writing from City University. She runs workshops and coordinates Write By You, a community writing project for underrepresented young female writers in the UK.
Danielle Vrublevskis was born in Germany, grew up in Bristol and now lives in London. She’s worked as a researcher, bookseller, and translator, both in the UK and in Beijing and Hong Kong. When she’s not writing, she can be found trying to coax her balcony tomato plants back to life.
Anna Whyatt is a writer, sculptor, and dramaturg. She has worked for many years in creative/cultural fields nationally and in Europe, including work with Tate Modern, the UK Film Council, an award-winning production at Chelsea Flower Show and advising at UK Ministerial and Shadow Cabinet level. She has been shortlisted and longlisted for several national and international literary competitions. Her sculpture has been shown in the UK, America and Poland, including a group exhibition sponsored by the V&A. Her published non-fiction covers articles, two books and ten years as a columnist for a national magazine.
David Winstone is a Writer/ Director from the UK whose short film, For Elsie won the 2012 Student Academy Award. This led to a David Lean scholarship to study at the National Film & Television School, where he made more award-winning short films. He has also written several short stories including When the Bird Sings, which has been selected for The Blackwater Press Short Story Collection 2021. Recently he has been working in television on shows such as Hard Sun, River City, and Gangs of London.
The winner of this year’s BSSP will be announced on October 9th. Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 14, featuring the 20 stories shortlisted for this year’s BSSP, will be published on October 9th and is available to pre-order from our publisher, Tangent Books, here: https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/shop/bristol-short-story-prize-volume-14