The 2024 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize is now open for submissions. The competition is for original short fiction by writers without previous publication.

First Prize is £1000, Second Prize is £500, Third Prize is £250.

The three prize winners will each receive a development meeting with a member of the Spread the Word team, a year’s membership to their London Writers Network, plus four free places for workshops and courses on their regular programme. The short story publisher Scratch Books is also offering editorial feedback for the top three authors, and a longlisted entry will be published in a print edition of The London Magazine.

The twelve longlisted stories will be published in Brick Lane Bookshop’s New Short Stories 2024 anthology.

We are keen to encourage quality, so suggest writers to check their stories before submitting using Prowritingaid. They have free and paid versions and are the best writing software we know to help improve grammar, readability and check for repetition, ‘sticky’ sentences and suggest alternatives.