When the first Asham Award was launched in 1996 - in honour of Asham House, the house in Sussex where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived - nearly a thousand unknown women writers took part. The first anthology of winning stories, published a year later and entitled The Catch, demonstrated not only the rich cultural mix of our society today, but the huge range of largely untapped talent in towns and villages across the UK. The second and third collections were equally successful, and this fourth collection promises to be even better, with, once again, over one thousand entries to this year's competition and commissioned stories from Lesley Glaister, Liz Jensen, Francine Stock, Kamila Shamsie, Erica Wagner and Maggie O'Farrell, among others. Shoe Fly Baby is a collection of stories that successfully blends the work of established writers with new authors - and taken together represents the very best of contemporary short story writing.