Submissions now closed for 2026 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University

Submissions for the 2026 BBC National Short Story Awards with Cambridge University have now closed.

The winner of the 2026 Award will be announced in September 2026.

Di Speirs, founder of the Award and a constant judging presence, will chair the panel as in 2025, and is joined by a stellar list of judges: 2022 NSSA winner Saba Sams, whose highly acclaimed debut novel ‘Gunk’ was published last year, two former NSSA shortlistees, Tahmima Anam (2016) and Will Eaves (2017), and author Andrew Michael Hurley.

On chairing the Award once again, Chair Di Speirs says:

I am absolutely delighted to be chairing the 2026 BBC National Short Story Award with such a terrific panel of judges. The joy of a brilliantly written story never palls. Great fiction has the ability to peel back the layers; short stories, more than any other form, can capture and distil our times and how we navigate them. So once again I’m excited at the prospect of discovery, delight, invention and imagination, and of seeing the world anew through the eyes of writers more perspicacious than me.

You can listen to the 2025 winning entry – Colwill Brown’s ‘You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle’ – on BBC Sounds, read by Sophie McShera, alongside other shortlisted and winning entries from previous years.

Submissions for the 2026 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge closed at 9am (GMT), Monday 16th March 2026.