BBC National Short Story Award 2025

About

A couple recovering from a car accident struggle to learn how to live together in the country of their birth...

An outsider looking for an apartment in an authentic part of Jerusalem finds the bareness of a new flat suddenly overwhelming...

A Parks and Gardens employee adapts to the unwanted company of a teenage temp worker, while grappling with her own private failings...

The stories shortlisted for the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award all feature characters struggling to adjust to new lives, burdened by past relationships as well as by outgrown versions of oneself. Yet within these stories are also moments of hope, humour and defiance that remind us: our narratives are ours to write.

Press

Follow the story on BBC Radio 4.

‘Since 2010, all five stories shortlisted for the BBC National short story award have been published in book form by the wonderful Comma Press. It’s always a stellar shortlist, varied in all ways other than quality. As gifts go, the anthology is perfect: first-rate fiction, the stories as compact as the physical book itself (you can carry it in the deep pocket of a winter coat). And, best of all, next Christmas you can give it to the discerning reader all over again’ - Kamila Shamsie, 30 authors on the books they give to everyone, in The Guardian