This year’s winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize  is Bernie McGill with her short story collection This Train is For,  published by  No Alibis Press.

Now in its 17th year, The Edge Hill Prize is the only annual UK-based award to  recognise  excellence in a single-authored short story collection, with a first prize of £10,000.

Bernie McGill is the author of two novels, The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch House, and two collections of short stories, Sleepwalkers and the Edge Hill prize-winner This Train is For (No Alibis Press).

The judges for this year’s prize were the winner of last year’s award Saba Sams; Lucy Luck, agent at C&W Agency, and short story writer and Edge Hill creative writing lecturer Andrea Ashworth.

The winner received her award at a ceremony at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury. She said: “It’s such an honour to have won the Edge Hill Prize. I’ve been reading the winning collections for years. I’m a huge fan of the short story, as both a reader and as a writer. When working on the longer form gets challenging, I sneak off for a philander with the short form. I love the intensity of it, and I love the buzz of finishing one.”

Naomi Booth was the winner of the £1,000 Reader’s Choice Award for her collection Animals at Night (Dead Ink Books).

Will Clark, a student on the Edge Hill MA in Creative Writing, won the prize for best short story submitted by a student.

Five collections made the shortlist, namely:

• Total by Rebecca Miller (Canongate)
• Love in the Time of Chaos by Rosemary Jenkinson (Arlen House)
• Cat Brushing & Other Stories by Jane Campbell (Riverrun)
• Animals at Night by Naomi Booth (Dead Ink Books)
• This Train is for… by Bernie McGill (No Alibis Press)

Founded in 2006, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize attracts entries from new and established writers. Professor of short fiction Ailsa Cox founded the award to highlight the “artisanship of short-story writing” and acknowledge the wealth of published collections available.

Previous winners of the award include Sarah Hall, David Szalay, Tessa Hadley and Kevin Barry.

Bernie McGill’s award-winning stories have been widely praised for their emotional depth and lyrical language.

She is a writer of profound sensitivity and observation whose masterful deployment of linguistic precision and economy enables her to plumb the depths of human experience while neatly avoiding sentimentalism.

This new collection, the first since 2013, contains unpublished stories along with a number of previously published stories contained within award winning anthologies.

This Train is For is available from No Alibis Books.