V.S Pritchett 2026 shortlist announced
The prize honours outstanding unpublished short stories from a wide array of authors.
The Royal Society of Literature, in partnership with the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, is delighted to announce the shortlist for its V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. The prize, is an annual award for unpublished short stories between 2,000 and 4,000 words in length. The winner will receive £1,000 and their entry will be published the RSL’s Review.
The winner will be announced on Thursday 26 February 2026 at the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) Annual Awards ceremony.
From the longlist announced on 14 January, this year’s judges Tishani Doshi, Kirsty Gunn, and Tow Vowler have selected:
Shortlist
Fionnuala O’Leary – If You Knew How Much I Love You
“A powerfully visceral allegory of coercive control, its escalating horror disturbing but never gratuitous. Carter-esque in its authority and aesthetic.” Tom Vowler
Fionnuala O’Leary is a PR professional based in Dublin. She lived in New York City for eight years, where she worked as a news editor and journalist in Manhattan and on Long Island. Her short fiction has twice won the New Irish Writing competition, with her work appearing in the Irish Independent Review Magazine (December 2025) and the Irish Times (May 2020). Fionnuala is currently working on her debut collection of short stories.
Hannah Webb – Bottom’s Dream
“A sharp-witted, hugely accomplished and taut piece, wonderfully ambitious in its scope with an audacious refusal to be pinned down.” Tom Vowler
Hannah Webb is a writer and bookseller living in London. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck College. Her short story, ‘Titanic’, was published by Fictionable. She is currently working on her first novel.
Mairi Griffin – Wee Dirty
“Wee Dirty sets the reader up for one thing and then deftly subverts all expectations, capturing girlhood friendship at its most alive. Through cracking dialogue and a keen sense of adulthood and the future quietly encroaching, the story leaves us wholly on the side of its young protagonists.” Tishani Doshi
Mairi Griffin is a Scottish writer based in East Lothian. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde but abandoned the craft for eleven years until the birth of her first child inspired her to write again. Since then, her poetry and prose have been included in a number of literary journals. She is currently working on her first novel.
Jonny Aldridge – Of Being Such a God
“A wonderfully assured short story, full of fabulous detail freighted with menace and foreboding. The overall construction was sophisticated, and the delivery of its ending performed in deathly quiet. V.S Pritchett himself would have loved this story, I am sure.” Kirsty Gunn
Jonny Aldridge is a writer based in northeast England. His short stories, poetry and non-fiction have featured in 3:AM, Litro, Liars’ League and elsewhere. He is editor-in-chief of the Teesside literary magazine Transporter and writes the Writing Stories newsletter in print and on Substack. He is writing a novel.
Keith Goh Johnson – Willkommen!
“Willkommen! is a compelling story of transformation and fear, opening in an apparently ordinary register before quietly gathering an atmosphere of unease. Like the best short stories, it shifts our sense of reality, showing how the everyday can almost imperceptibly slip into the sinister.” Tishani Doshi
Keith Goh Johnson is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He was highly commended in the Forty South Tasmanian Writers’ Prize 2023 and shortlisted for The Best Australian Yarn 2023, the 2024 and 2025 Newcastle Short Story Award and the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is published or forthcoming in adda, Overland, Island Magazine, The Saltbush Review, Meniscus, the West Australian and various anthologies.
Priyanka Verma - House of Thread
“This quietly compelling study of a woman’s determination and domestic life carries the reader through a journey of discovery, as we peel away the layers of a life to see what lies within. Confidently imagined and executed.” Kirsty Gunn
Priyanka Verma is a London-based writer. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate WRITE Prize and longlisted for the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. She is currently at work on a novel and debut short story collection about family, migration, and the quiet power struggles embedded in human relationships.
