We are so proud to see that Colwill Brown’s ‘You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle’ and Edward Hogan’s ‘Little Green Man’ have been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2025.

The winning author will receive £15,000, and the four further shortlisted authors will receive £600 each. The five stories will be broadcast in turn from Monday 15th to Friday 19th September on Radio 4 and available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Di Speirs MBE, chair of the 2025 BBC National Short Story Award judging panel, said: “I am thrilled to be celebrating two decades of the BBC National Short Story Award. Designed to find the very best, this 20th 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.”

Edward Hogan is the author of five novels, whose 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. Colwill Brown’s debut novel, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh,  was published in February 2025 by Chatto & Windus.

For more information and to see the full shortlist, click here.