ABSTRACT
Women short story writers are thriving in Britain today, producing work of tremendous range and diversity. As the founder and organiser of the Edge Hill Prize for the short story, I am sent copies of almost every new collection from the UK and Ireland. Twice in its eleven-year history, the shortlist has been all-female: an anthology Head Land (Glass 2016), with stories by previous winners and finalists, demonstrates the contribution made by major women authors, including Sarah Hall, Ali Smith and A.L. Kennedy – well-established figures who have several collections under their belts, and usually novels as well. In this chapter, I shall focus on a selection of less familiar titles, all published since 2012, three of them shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. They are Diving Belles by Lucy Wood (2012), Carys Bray’s Sweet Home (2012), Carys Davies’s The Redemption of Galen Pike (2014) and K.J. Orr’s Light Box (2016a). After briefly introducing the writers and their collections, I shall discuss the publishing context and the culture of the short story in the UK, as it affects the careers of women writers. I shall then analyse the stories themselves, comparing the narrative strategies used by each author, and the cultural resonances of their work in Britain today.
