This year’s Story Wine Prize submissions yielded a superb collection of hotly contested favourites and we judges were blessed with an exciting long- and shortlist. For us, the best of these stories honed in on a moment, relationship, mood or event with precision and attention to the finest evocative detail, some managing to also traverse deep issues and spans of time – and all in fewer than 800 words.

On the bus she’s pressed next to a man with the same grey hair as her father, and he’s reading the news while the rain falls outside the windows on the new blossoms, and she thinks how glad she is of the fact of spring because it reminds her of when she was four ...