Tag: fiction

A Personal Anthology

A Personal Anthology is a short story project run by the writer Jonathan Gibbs. Each week he asks a guest editor to choose their twelve favourite short stories and write about them. It was a big challenge to come up with my list – it contains a few familiar names, but also I hope one or two surprises. You can read it here.

Publication Day!

It’s publication day for Best British Short Stories 2025, which includes my story ‘Ghost Walks’! Available from all good bookshops, or from the publisher Salt Books.

Here’s what the Manchester Review had to say about my story:

“Another unusually surprising story was Ian Critchley’s ‘Ghost Walks’, telling the story of a woman having a moment of Déjà vu as she revisits York, where she once spent her student days and met her future husband. What, at surface level, can be read as a deceptively simple ghost story turns into a complex exploration of identity, marriage and retrospection on the lives we thought we would live in the halcyon days of youth.”

Best British Short Stories 2025

Absolutely chuffed to bits to announce that my story ‘Ghost Walks’, originally published by The Fiction Desk, is included in this year’s Best British Short Stories, the prestigious anthology of the year’s best short stories, published annually by Salt Publishing.

It’s not published until November, but until 31 July it can be pre-ordered from Waterstones for a massive 25% discount: https://www.waterstones.com/book/best-british-short-stories-2025/nicholas-royle/david-bevan/9781784633530

Removals Reviews

‘What a clever, intriguing chapbook by Ian Critchley. ‘Removals’, published by Nightjar Press achieves so much in just a few pages. Draws you in, then pulls you somewhere else and cleverly turns you back on yourself. Like fine tailoring: precise, deceptive, with the seams hidden.’ Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

‘With its crisp, humorous prose and excellent dialogue, in less than eight pages Ian Critchley’s Removals (2024) manages to pose a tempting question about life, the universe and everything that might have you thinking for days’ Giselle Leeb, Interzone

‘an eerie and compelling short story’ Margo Laurie, Goodreads, 5 stars

‘A magnificently eerie story’ David Harris, Blue Book Balloon; also 5 star review on Goodreads

‘Another terrific title from Nightjar Press; a crisply effective chiller from the excellent Ian Critchley’ Andy Humphrey

Published by Nightjar Press. Buy here

The Nightjar Has Landed

Delighted to say that my short story chapbook, ‘Removals’, has now been published by Nightjar Press. Such a thrill to be part of this brilliant series of stories, described by the press as having ‘something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful’ about them.

The fantastic cover image, so apt for the story, is by Nicholas Royle, Nightjar Press’s publisher, and himself a superb short story writer and champion of the form.

The chapbook can be bought from the publisher’s website: https://nightjarpress.weebly.com

How I Wrote ‘High-Intensity Interval Training’

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(Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash)

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. Mostly that’s a difficult question to answer, but this story had a very definite moment of inspiration. It was conceived while doing a Joe Wicks workout in lockdown, which I think is the first time I’ve ever got anything truly satisfying out of exercise. Writing really is 90 per cent perspiration.

I love stories in which the structure complements, comments on and expands the theme and plot. With the HIIT workouts, I quickly realised that the different exercises could provide a workable structure. The ‘Warm Up’ and ‘Cool Down’ provided an obvious beginning and ending, and it was a short step from there to the idea that this could be about the course of a relationship.

Then it was a case of selecting the exercises that could be used as stepping stones in that relationship arc. Some lent themselves very quickly: I saw how I could use ‘Mountain Climbers’ and ‘Plank’ and ‘Butt Kicks’, but I knew I needed something more. That’s where the ‘Russian Twist’ came in.

My dad has never been keen to discuss his childhood and indeed appears to have forgotten almost every detail of his past. I’d picked up bits of information here and there. In particular, I believed that his grandparents were Russian Jews, who came over to England to escape the early twentieth-century pogroms in Russia. I asked him once if he knew anything about this and he said no, though he called his grandmother ‘Bushka’. It may be a stretch to definitively link this to the Russian word babushka, meaning ‘grandmother’, and I may never find out the truth, but it planted a seed that eventually provided a key theme in the story and made it about something deeper than merely keeping fit.

I knew the story worked, but was hesitant to send it out. It takes me so long to write a story that it often feels out of date by the time it’s finished. I didn’t know if anybody would want to read a story about lockdown workouts so long after the lockdowns were over. I was therefore stunned and delighted when the story won the Hammond House International Literary Prize.

You can read the story here (click on the down arrow on the right-hand side of that page to expand the text).