The BBC National Short Story Award 2010

Featuring the five shortlisted 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.