Best British Short Stories 2027

Synopsis

The seventeenth annual record of the British short story.

In its seventeenth year, Best British Short Stories remains the essential annual survey of the form. Editor Nicholas Royle reads widely – literary magazines, anthologies, single-author collections, online journals, small-press chapbooks – to bring together a selection that captures both established voices and the writers remaking the British short story now.

Royle’s eye is famously catholic: realism sits beside the uncanny, the experimental beside the classically told, the established beside the previously unpublished. What unites the selection is quality of attention and seriousness about the form.

For readers, writers, teachers and editors, this is the year’s indispensable anthology.