The BBC National Short Story Award 2010

Featuring the five short-listed stories for the BBC National Short Story Award, this collection brings together a high-caliber group of new and established British authors exploring human relationships at their most dysfunctional and yet sustaining. Splintered families, the persistence of love, the public versus the private, and the plight of the outsider provide recurring themes in this 2010 selection of works.

David Constantine is a translator, the coeditor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and a former professor of German language and literature. He is the author of several books, including the poetry collection Nine Fathom Deep and the short story collections The Shieling and Under the Dam. Aminatta Forna is a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund and a member of the advisory committee of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She is the author of Ancestor Stones, The Devil That Danced on the Water, and The Memory of Love and the recipient of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and the Liberaturpreis in Germany. Sarah Hall is the author of several novels, including The Carhullan Army, The Electric Michelangelo, Haweswater, and How to Paint a Dead Man. She is the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and the Lakeland Book of the Year Prize. Jon McGregor is the author of several novels, including Even the Dogs and So Many Ways to Begin. He has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize and his short stories have been published in such literary magazines as Granta. Helen Oyeyemi is the author of several novels, including The Icarus Girl, Mr. Fox, and White Is for Witching, which received the Somerset Maugham Award. She was named to the Venus Zine "25 Under 25" list. James Naughtie is a radio presenter for the BBC. He is a former correspondent for newspapers that include the Guardian and the Washington Post. He has received such awards as the Sony Radio Awards Radio Personality of the Year and Voice of the Listener and Viewer Award.