Is the short story the literary form of the moment? Prize juries seem to think so. When judged against the novel the short story has won out in the International Man Booker, the Nobel, the inaugural Folio prize and just recently, the Independent Foreign Fiction prize.

But where, asked AS Byatt as US short story supremo George Saunders collected his Folio prize in March, are the British authors? When curating the programme for the upcoming London Short Story Festival, I began to think about the great short story writers Britain has produced, and what their best works might be.

I asked Cathy Galvin, founder of the Sunday Times EFG short story award and director of Word Factory, a short story salon bringing together readers and writers. She says it's a difficult task to choose a single story from "a field that holds everyone from DH Lawrence to PG Wodehouse; from Charles Dickens to HG Wells; from Virginia Woolf to AS Byatt". Her current recommendations are Tea at the Midland by David Constantine ("elegant, redemptive, human") and All the Rage by AL Kennedy ("is this woman really the love-child of Samuel Beckett and Katherine Mansfield?")

She continues: "If you are looking for simple joy in one story, try Clive Sinclair's subversive account of a rabbi who turns into a pig in A Bad End, from his latest collection Death and Texas. The writer Philip Hensher is currently collating an anthology of the best of British short story writing and we are agreed on the brilliance of a now-forgotten funny, working-class collection that created an appetite for the short story in both of us: Bill Naughton's The Goalkeepers' Revenge."

So what is the best British short story? We have opened the question up to readers and writers everywhere, and votes are now coming in on the Short Story Festival website. Jackie Kay's My Daughter the Fox is one of the nominations. She in turn recommends "one of our best and most neglected short story writers, the Scottish writer Agnes Owens. If I had to pick just one story, it'd be The Lighthouse. I love the voice of this story and the way the structure surprises you."

Adam Marek is a rising star in the British short story world; his story Tamagotchi was nominated via the website. His own vote goes to Memories of the Space Age by JG Ballard: "It puts a lot of pressure on an individual story to test it for bestness. But from a line-up of British short story authors, I'd pick JG Ballard as one of the best we ever had. Memories of the Space Age – an amazing, glass-clear, Ballardian oddity."

So what's your choice? Spread the Word is offering the chance to win a year-long membership of their writer development agency if you vote over at the Festival website. At the Festival launch on 21 June, a shortlist of three will be drawn up and the winning story will be read by Stella Duffy at the free closing event on Sunday 22 June at 4.15pm at Waterstones' Piccadilly branch.

• The London Short Story Festival in association with Waterstones Piccadilly runs from Friday 20 – Sunday 22 June