*INCLUDES WINNING STORY BY INGRID PERSAUD* Hung-over and grief-stricken, a man contemplated suicide at the edge of a cliff, until he is unexpectedly distracted

A young woman’s birthday party is disturbed by the vision of a homeless man sleeping under an arrangement of mocking fruit... A late-night text conversation g

A group of teenage boys take turns assessing each other’s changing bodies before a Friday night disco… A grieving woman strikes up an unlikely friendship wi

Back for the fourteenth year, the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University aims to celebrate and promote the best in contemporary short fiction.

There is in the short story, at its most characteristic, something we do not often find in the novel, Frank O’Connor wrote, ‘an intense awareness of human l