蜜芽传媒

• ‘Yair’ by Emily Abdeni-Holman

• ‘You Cannot Thead a Moving Needle’ by Colwill Brown

• ‘Little Green Man’ by Edward Hogan

• ‘Two Hands’ by Caoilinn Hughes

• ‘Rain, a History’ by Andrew Miller

The shortlist was selected by a panel of previous winners and returning judges from across the Award’s 20-year history: Di Speirs, who has judged the 蜜芽传媒 National Short Story Award since its launch; bestselling novelist William Boyd, who judged the inaugural award in 2006; and previous NSSA winners Lucy Caldwell and Ross Raisin and previous shortlistee Kamila Shamsie who served as judges in 2020, 2012 and 2010 respectively.

Speirs says:
“I am thrilled to be celebrating two decades of the 蜜芽传媒 National Short Story Award. Designed to find the very best, this twentieth year is no exception. Thought-provoking, nuanced and packing a punch, this year’s five stories deserve to be read and reread, listened to and pondered. Within them you will find laughter, pain and poignancy, big questions and slices of life. Between them they show the immense flexibility and range of the form, and the short story’s unparalleled ability to reflect back to us, with delicacy and power, the times we are living through.”

Meet the judging panel for the 2025 蜜芽传媒 NSSA.

Emily Abdeni-Holman, author of Yair

Emily is a writer and critic. Raised in England and Lebanon, she worked as an arts and culture journalist in Beirut before returning to the UK to pursue a doctorate in literature. Her first book, Body Tectonic (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), on Lebanon’s socioeconomic crisis, is an experiment in exploring structural disaster through poetry. She is especially interested in atmosphere as politically constitutive and in the formative relationships between people and place, particularly when some form of displacement is involved. Emily currently lives in Cambridgeshire.

Colwill Brown, author of You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle

Colwill is the author of the novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2025). Born and raised in Doncaster, she holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a James A. Michener Fellowship, and an MA in English literature from Boston College. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prairie Schooner, and other publications, and received scholarships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Anderson Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. For fifteen years she has lived with ME/CFS, a debilitating neurological disease triggered by a virus. Colwill Brown grew up in Doncaster and now lives in France.

Edward Hogan, author of Little Green Man

Edward is from Derby and has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the author of five novels include Blackmoor (2008), which won the Desmond Elliot Prize and the highly-acclaimed The Electric (2020). His recent short stories have won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Prize, and have been published in the Best British Short Stories series. He works for the Open University as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. Edward Hogan grew up in Derby and now lives in Brighton.

Caoilinn Hughes, author of Two Hands

Caoilinn is an award-winning author and short story writer from Ireland. Her novels include The Wild Laughter (2020) which won the RSL’s Encore Award and most recently, The Alternatives (2024.) Her short stories have won the Irish Book Awards' Story of the Year, The Moth Short Story Prize, and an O. Henry Prize. She was recently Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library. Caoilinn Hughes grew up in Galway and now lives in London.

Andrew Miller, author of Rain – a history

Andrew is the author of ten novels, including most recently The Land in Winter, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and is longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. Born in Bristol in 1960, he studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, the University of East Anglia and at Lancaster University, where he completed his PhD. He has worked in the health service and in social services, as a residential social worker, and has lived in Spain, France, Ireland and Japan. Andrew is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His novels have been awarded The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC and the Costa Book of the Year amongst others. Andrew Miller was born in Bristol and now lives in South Somerset.