Avast... the year of the short story!

Image taken from Bloomsbury's short story sampler

I am currently reading three short story collections simultaneously (not literally simultaneously - just swapping between books story to story). One is by Jon McGregor, the twice runner-up of the BBC National Short Story Award, the other is by Israeli supremo Etgar Keret and the newest one to land on my desk is Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. And it's only January!

Last year, Bloomsbury declared 2012 was the year of the short story by announcing a series of collections. The BBC National Short Story Award has gone international for one year only and The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award is back for its third year. Also, so far, in the fourth week of January, I've had 15 different short story collections land on my desk.

The long-declared 'resurgence' of the artform is finally happening! And it's exciting! Thanks to the internet, journals, imprints like Shortfire Press, various reading challenges on blogs like Me and My Big Mouth and Rob Around Books to do with short stories, they are finally rising from the ashes of being damned with faint praise. No longer will publishers say, 'We love short stories but they don't sell!'

Today's announcement that the popular Costa Book Awards is adding a short story category (one that will go alongside the categories contending for Book of the Year) for 2012 is terribly exciting. It shows a mainstream acknowledgement of the power of the artform. Now short stories can reclaim their rightful place amongst fiction, poetry, biography and children's books.

And judging by all the competitions we list here there's a lot of places to be sending your work.

It's the year of the short story! It's about time!