There are 8 days to go until we announce the winner of this year’s Bristol Short Story Prize and launch our 13th anthology. Following on from yesterday’s post, please meet the remaining ten writers in the running for this year’s top prize.

Radhika Kapur’s work as a copywriter has won awards at Cannes, One Show, Clio and Asia Pacific Adfest. She was longlisted for BBC’s Drama Scriptroom in 2017, the London Short Story Prize in 2016 and won third place in the Euroscript Screenwriting Competition in 2015. Her short fiction has been published by literary journals and in the anthologies: Love Across a Broken Map and May We Borrow Your Country. Radhika is a member of the South Asian Writers’ Collective, The Whole Kahani, and has completed an MA in Screenwriting from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Barbara Leahy is from Cork, Ireland. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including Flash magazine, The Irish Literary Review, and the Bridport Prize Anthology, and have been broadcast on RTÉ (Irish National) radio. She is a past winner of the Wells Festival of Literature Short Story Competition, and the Words With Jam Shortest Story Competition. Earlier this year, she was shortlisted for the Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Award.

Tehila Lieberman’s debut short story collection, Venus in the Afternoon, received the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction. Individual stories have been awarded the Stanley Elkin Memorial Prize and the Rick Demarinis Short Fiction Prize and have appeared in many literary journals.  Tehila’s non-fiction has appeared in Salon.com and in several Travelers’ Tales Guides anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Originally from New York, Tehila lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she consults as a writing coach for Harvard Business School. 

Michael Mau is a writer, teacher, actor and artist. Michael’s short fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, New Limestone Review, Portland Review, and other places. An Open Letter to America From a Public School Teacher, originally published in McSweeney’s, received national attention when it was picked up by several news outlets. His story, Little Bird, was selected by Lily Hoang as the winner of the Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest. Michael was a finalist for the 2017 and 2018 Disquiet Prize. 

Stephen Narain was raised in Freeport, Bahamas by Guyanese parents and moved to Miami at seventeen.  He earned an AB in English from Harvard University and an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he won a Soros New American Fellowship.  Stephen is the recipient of the Small AxeFiction Prize, the Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, and the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Youth Activist Scholarship for work assisting attorneys defending the First Amendment. He lives in Orlando, Florida.

Will Neal is a South London-born writer and investigative journalist based in Sarajevo. He has written for the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, The Guardian, VICE UK, The Sunday Times and Novara Media. His short fiction has been published with the Anglo-American literary magazine, Litro. 

Makena Onjerika won the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, Johannesburg Review of Books, Fireside Quarterly, Wasafiri, Waxwing, Jalada, New Daughters of Africa, Doek!, DRR and others. She runs the Nairobi Fiction Writing Workshop and recently published the workshop’s first anthology, Digital Bedbugs. She writes both realist literary fiction and speculative fiction.

Originally from Nürnberg, Susanne Stich has lived in Ireland for many years. Her writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Ambit, Bath Flash Fiction, TSS Publishing and other magazines. In 2018 she was a finalist at the Irish Novel Fair and received a bursary award from the Irish Arts Council to work on her debut novel. She has worked in the arts and educational sector as a lecturer, curator and facilitator, and is currently Literary Guide at Verbal Arts Centre, Derry, where she curates literature for shared reading sessions in the community, promoting dialogue and wellbeing.

Rowena Warwick has a diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa, both with distinction. Her poetry is widely published and has been placed and listed in competitions, most notably Magma and The Hippocrates Prize. She has been longlisted for the National Poetry Prize. Her first novel is underway. Mostly she is writing, but when she isn’t you may find her working in the NHS or playing her trumpet. 

Christopher Young is a writer based in Southwark, South London. His fiction has been published in T-R-E-M-O-R-S magazine, and he has been longlisted for the Bath Novel Award. In 2014, he received the Malcolm Bradbury Continuation Prize for Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. He is currently working on his first novel, about inequality and class in the service industry.

Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 13 , featuring the 20 stories shortlisted for this year’s BSSP, is available to pre-order from our publisher, Tangent Books, here: https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/shop/bristol-short-story-prize-volume-13