Authors shortlisted for the National Short Story Award have tackled Donald Trump, #MeToo and millennial life.
The winner from the six-strong shortlist will be awarded £15,000 for their work.
Talents from an award-winning novelist to charity workers and civil servants have caught eye of judges adjudicating this year’s BBC National Short Story Award, with Cambridge University.
Now in its 14th year, the short stories have been praised for their ability to move a reader with issues facing the modern world.
Nikki Bedi, TV and radio broadcaster and chair of judges, said: “One of the things I’ve discovered over a lifetime of meeting, interviewing and spending time with the most extraordinary creative minds in the world, is that they all have something in common: they seek to move us, to make us think and to transform us.
“I strongly believe all five of the shortlisted writers and stories we’ve chosen do all that and more.”
– Novelist Lucy Caldwell’s The Children deals with motherhood, and child migrants on the border of the US and Mexico
– Civil servant Tamsin Grey’s My Beautiful Millennial tackles the isolation of a young woman living in London
– Charity worker Jacqueline Crook’s work Silver Fish In The Midnight Sea deals with isolation and childhood memories of Jamaica.
– Former bookseller Lynda Clark’s Ghillies Mum explores intolerance through a tale of shape-shifting.
– Jo Lloyd’s The Invisible charts a Welsh community being torn apart by the tales of one woman.
The work of the shortlisted authors was selected from a list of 900 entries.
The winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4 Front Row on Tuesday October 1.