Editor Interview: Bath Short Story Award

Winners' anthology

We love the short collection, Dinosaurs on Other Planets written by Danielle McGaughlin whom we interviewed on our site, the short story collection, Don't Read This At Home, by Angela Readman, our second prize winner in the Bath short Story Award last year (2015). She's published by &OtherStories, a small press that produces beautifully presented books. We also like The Good Son, a novel by Paul McVeigh who we have also interviewed on our site. It's published by Salt who publish a whole range of exciting writers.

Currently I love Colin Barrett who won the Guardian First Book Award 2014 for his debut collection Young Skins. Gerard Woodward's novels and short stories. Lucia Berlin's short stories and the novels of Kate Atkinson.

We pay a lot of attention to the quality of the anthology. Our cover design is by one of our winners, who is an artist as well a writer. We also include a selection of stories long listed in our competition as well as the winning and shortlisted pieces.

In order to be published, writers need to have won a prize or have been listed in our yearly contest. The best advice we have In order to create a winning story is to read all the advice and tips from the many authors we have interviewed on our site. A short summary would be to write a fantastic beginning and make sure it ends well.

The ideal submission would be from someone who has carefully read all the rules, has formatted and laid out their piece perfectly, and has written a story that lingers long afterwards.

We judge blind and one of our rules is for authors not to leave their names on their stories. A surprising number of people are disqualified for this reason and also for going over the word limit, which is 2200 words.

If writers are short listed for the contest, then we ask for a 100 word bio.

We have a team of ten readers. Every story gets read at least twice all the way through.

If the story reaches the long list after being read by the initial reading team, then it is read at least three more times by the core Team who choose the final longlist and the shortlist. The shortlisted stories are then read by an outside judge, usually a literary agent. This year we have a BBC Radio 4 Short story producer as the shortlist judge.

The reading period for the yearly contest is a busy time. (Mainly March, April and May). We are also very keen to promote our winning writers and their further successes and writing opportunities in general and spend a lot of time throughout the year on social media doing this, particularly via twitter. We also make a point of interviewing successful authors for our website. We are very keen to get people reading and writing in the short form.