Lisa Blower
Lisa Blower is the winner of the 2025 V.S Pritchard prize with her short story Blessings in Burslem
In 2009, her short story Broken Crockery won the Guardian Weekend’s summer short fiction special.She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award for her story Barmouth in 2013.
Her debut novel Sitting Ducks was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Arnold Bennet Boom Prize in 2017. Blower’s debut short story collection, It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s, published in 2019 is set in Stoke-on-Trent. It won the Arnold Bennett Book Prize and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She published the novel Pondweed in 2020.
Ed Hogan
Ed Hogan is from Derby. His five novels include Blackmoor, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and The Electric. His recent short stories have won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Prize, and he is currently shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award 2025. Ed works for the Open University, and lives in Brighton.
Sarah Schofield
Sarah Schofield’s stories have been published in Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt) Lemistry, Bio-Punk, Thought X, Beta Life, Spindles and Conradology (all Comma Press) Spilling Ink Flash Fiction Anthology, Synaesthesia Magazine, Lakeview International Journal, Woman’s Weekly, Morning Star, Hinterland magazine and others. She has been shortlisted on the Bridport and the Guardian Travel Writing Competition and won the Orange New Voices Prize, Writer’s Inc and The Calderdale Fiction Prize. An excerpt from her story ‘The Bactogarden’ featured on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book. Her debut short story collection, Safely Gathered In was published in November 2021 and she is currently working on her second collection.
Karitas Hrundar Palsdottir
Karítas is the first person from Iceland to hold a PhD in creative writing. She is a visiting research fellow at the University of East Anglia and just published her first monograph Readaptation Narratives in Sojourner Literature with Palgrave Macmillan. Reykjavik Literary Agency (RLA) is now seeking publication for her short story collection Neither Nor Both And which, like the monograph, explores cross-cultural readaptation. Moreover, Karítas is a pioneer in Icelandic easy language fiction and has published three flash fiction collections that promote linguistic and cultural literacy in Iceland.
Joe Bedford
Joe Bedford is an author from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and have won several awards, including the Bridport Prize 2024. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People was published by Parthian Books in 2023.
Georgina Parfitt
Georgina grew up in Norfolk, England. She moved to the United States at 19, to Harvard University, where she studied fiction with Amy Hempel and started to think of the short story as a place she could happily live. She went on to gain her MFA at Boston University and to teach undergraduates there. She now writes and teaches in Liverpool. She has published stories and essays in The Atlantic, The Dublin Review, Ambit, Washington Square Review, Granta, and in Best British Short Stories 2023. She has been writer-in-residence at the H J Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, USA, and at Villa Sarkia in Finland.
A. J, Ashworth
A. J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize, was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The TLS said of her work: ‘A. J. Ashworth’s first collection of short stories displays impressive versatility. She treats each of her characters to their own narrative timbre – and the stories do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution.’
She is also the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, in aid of The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has won funding such as an Arts Council England grant, a Society of Authors K. Blundell Trust Award and, most recently, a Society of Authors Authors’ Foundation grant. She has previously won the Baltic Writing Residency in Scotland and was also a Hawthornden Fellow. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, and has worked as an associate lecturer there as well as at Lancaster University. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice.