Short stories curated by Sunday Times Short Story

Annual British literary award celebrating the excellence of the modern short story, open to any writer from around the world who's been published in the UK or Ireland.

Listing 20 stories.

In Dubai, a Bangladeshi construction worker with an exploitative and abusive boss reevaluates his life choices after a brush with death on the job site.

A sad divorcee invites his ex-wife to Ireland to visit his ailing father under the pretense that they are still together and learns that his father has romantic troubles of his own.

A nanny for newborns takes care of a mother with postpartum depression and her child. Against her own rules, she finds herself getting attached to the baby.

A gay man working in a luxury fashion store in Asia prepares for the upcoming arrival of the brand’s chief designer. If everything goes right, his desired career in fashion will be set.

A college sophomore returns home after breaking up with a serious boyfriend, sending her parents into a flurry of worry over her listless behavior. But who is really taking care of whom?

After her father kills himself, a young girl runs away with a traveling, unhoused stranger she meets at the bus stop. The two scrape and save for a life together until one day, she wakes up and he's gone. After looking for him in the cold, surviving an assault, and accepting help from a stranger, the girl realizes he's betrayed her, taking their savings and leaving. The next year, she gives birth to their child.

A grandmother takes care of her granddaughter Lisa for the summer while her son, Lisa's father, is in the hospital on life support. On the last day of her son's life, the grandmother distracts Lisa by taking her to a 4th of July block party.

After his older brother dies of cancer, a Dominican-American teen strikes up a sexual relationship with his middle-aged neighbor.

A 20-something-year-old woman returns home to Dublin when she hears that her abusive father is ill. Her return causes her to reevaluate the sexually ambiguous relationship she has with the older man who gave her a home when she had no one else.

In the distant future, a tech genius must learn new forms of intimacy when his wife is paralyzed from the neck down.