Tag: writing

Books of the Year 2022

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(Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash)

After a bit of a fallow period for short story reading last year, I maxed out this year with some wonderful collections.

Reverse Engineering is a series of books from newbie publisher Scratch Books and is based on a simple but wonderful concept: a set of classic contemporary stories alternating with interviews with their authors about their craft. Writers such as Sarah Hall and Chris Power give invaluable insights into their writing process. The second book in the series is on my Christmas list.

Nicholas Royle’s Manchester Uncanny (Confingo) is the second in a trilogy of collections exploring the mysterious and eerie corners of three cities (following London, and with Paris to come). Royle draws skilfully on Manchester’s geography and heritage, including a story based on Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures. A compelling collection.

I’ve long wanted to master the art of writing flash fiction but usually fail miserably. Nick Black’s collection of (mostly) flash pieces, Positive and Negative (AdHoc), is a terrific example of the genre. There was also a welcome new collection this year from Amanda Huggins – An Unfamiliar Landscape (Valley Press) features her excellent Colm Tóibín award-winning story ‘Eating Unobserved’. I also really enjoyed collections by Chloe Turner (Witches Sail in Eggshells, Reflex Press), Jamie Guiney (The Wooden Hill, époque) and Ben Pester (Am I in the Right Place?, Boiler House).   

In non-fiction, there were three standout books. The Passengers by Will Ashon (Faber) is a remarkable work of contemporary oral history: Ashon interviewed dozens of people all around the UK, and their voices bear witness to what it means to be alive today. Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends (Faber) is a lyrical and moving exploration of male friendship – a tribute to Scott Hutchison, the singer-songwriter who died in 2018.

For a number of years, the Times journalists Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson have jointly interviewed public figures. Their fascinating book, What I Wish I’d Known When I Was Young (William Collins) draws on these interviews to investigate how adversity in childhood can influence adult life.

Fiction-wise, I was greatly impressed by Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s Your Show (Faber), which tells the story of football referee Uriah Rennie. Set in Stone by Stela Brinzeanu (Legend) is a beautifully written tale of love against the odds, set in medieval Moldova but with contemporary resonances. Zoë Folbigg’s The Three Loves of Sebastian Cooper (Boldwood) is a page-turning story of three very different women as they gather at the funeral of the man they all loved.

I was hugely excited to learn that Louise Welsh was publishing a sequel to her brilliant novel The Cutting Room, and it didn’t disappoint. The Second Cut (Canongate) takes us back to the seedy Glasgow world of auctioneer Rilke in another superb literary thriller. Last but definitely not least, I loved Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code (Viper), an ingenious crime novel told almost entirely through transcribed audio files.

We Have a Winner!

(Photo by Corey Young on Unsplash)

So thrilled that my story ‘High-Intensity Interval Training’ has won the Hammond House International Literary Prize! 

This story was conceived during endless PE With Joe HIIT sessions in lockdown. Very glad that something other than exercise came out of those!

The full list of winners can be seen here. All the shortlisted entries will be published in a forthcoming anthology and there will be a prize-giving ceremony at the University Centre Grimsby Literary Festival in February 2023. 

Happy Publication Day!

Sunburnt Saints is published today! It’s a fantastic achievement by editors Andrew Leach and Hannah Persaud to get this anthology from conception to publication in just a few months.

My contribution, ‘Outage’, is a story of love and darkness, and I’m very proud and honoured to be among so many talented writers.

The book can be bought from Big Green Bookshop here: https://www.biggreenbookshop.com/big-green-exclusive-funstuff/sunburnt-saints-a-seventy2one-anthology/prod_1111.html

Read more about publisher Seventy2One and their exciting future publication plans here: http://massiveoverheads.com

Radio Times

Photo by Jacob Hodgson on Unsplash

Many thanks to writer and broadcaster Antonia Honeywell for dedicating her latest Chiltern Voice Book Club programme last Sunday to Seventy2One’s new anthology Sunburnt Saints. I was one of several contributors interviewed for the show, and we all got to choose a favourite song. So tune into the podcast to find out our picks. Oh, and to hear us talking about writing, of course: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/chiltern-voice-book-club/id1540563708?i=1000543272780

Antonia’s show is a great mix of book chat and music, and she’s got some fantastic guests coming up. It’s on http://chilternvoice.fm every Sunday 2pm-4pm, with the podcast landing shortly afterwards.

How I Wrote ‘Uffington’

I’ve loved the Uffington White Horse on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border since I first visited as teenager. One of the many figures carved out of the chalk hillsides across southern England, it’s the only one that has been dated to prehistoric times. Nobody knows for certain who made it or what it represents, though some say it’s a depiction of Epona, the Celtic goddess of fertility.

Over the years I’ve tried to write about this place many times, but nothing quite gelled. Then I read that in previous centuries there was an annual ‘scouring’ of the horse – a clean-up operation to keep the figure free of weeds. This scouring would be accompanied by much debauchery. The work is still done annually by volunteers for the National Trust, with new chalk hammered into the ground to freshen up the whiteness, but without the debauchery.

It was this notion of ‘scouring’ that really caught my imagination. Could this be applied to a character, perhaps in the sense of metaphorically sloughing off skin to reveal a new identity underneath?

So, the story would be called ‘The Scouring’ and have that element in it, plus lots more – betrayal, affairs, strange apparitions, debauchery . . . I did draft after draft over a couple of years and by the time I’d finished, I thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.

But then several beta readers showed me that what I’d done was really not working at all.

Hard to take, of course, but once I’d licked my wounds I realised they were right. A line I once wrote in one of my many unpublished novels came back to me: ‘There are only three things wrong with this piece of writing: the beginning, the middle and the end.’

I went back to the drawing board, changed the title and the characters, and the whole premise. And the beginning, the middle and the end. The only thing that remained was the figure of the white horse itself.  

More drafts, and finally there was ‘Uffington’, which to my astonishment has won the HISSAC Short Story Competition. You can read it here: http://www.hissac.co.uk/uploads/Shorts2021.pdf

Two Longlistings

It’s been a pretty lean year writing-wise. My decision to enter as many writing competitions as possible has backfired spectacularly, with a tsunami of failures that have penetrated even my rejection-thickened hide.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

But two small and very welcome glimmers have come in the form of longlistings in the Cambridge Short Story Prize and the HISSAC Short Story Prize – both for the same story, ‘Uffington’. It’s a story that has been through quite a drawn-out and painful genesis, so I’m delighted it’s received some recognition.

I didn’t progress any further in the first of these competitions, but the second is still in train, so fingers crossed.