londondwritingworkshops.com

Archive for the ‘Places to Read New Fiction’ Category

A  nice surprise this week when a little box turned up in the post from the University of Maine at Machias, USA. It was the latest edition of work from the Ultra-Short Short Story competition run by the university’s literary magazine, The Binnacle. Each 150-word story is printed on a matchbox-sized card with the author’s bio on the back. The whole collection of cards is encased in a nice blue box – a lovely little object.

At the other end of the scale, the Story website has news of  a new e-publishing venture called Ether Books which aims bring short fiction to people’s mobile phones. Two very different forms of publishing, although both ‘products’ can be held in the palm of the hand.

The People’s Book Prize looks like a worthwhile project. It aims to cut out the middlemen (and women) by offering readers a chance to promote the books they love. Each month there’s a vote, and the overall winning book will be declared in July 2010. Beryl Bainbridge is a patron.

Interesting to see their list of participating publishers – small  independent presses like Tindal Street and Legend rubbing shoulders with the likes of HarperCollins and Orion:

http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/publisher.php

Thanks to the British Council one of my stories has just been published in a dual language English/Chinese anthology called A Little Nest of Pedagogues. My story is a short piece called ‘Stranger’, which originally appeared in New Writing 13 (Picador, 2005); it was subsequently reprinted in a German magazine and now it’s travelling even further afield.

I’m one of ten writers, including Emily Perkins, Kamila Shamsie, Romesh Gunesekera and Fay Weldon, whose work has been translated here. The back cover describes the collection as ‘new writing from established writers and names to watch’. I’m amazed and delighted.

Kathy Page’s new novel, The Find, will be published in Canada on the 8th of April.The Find is set in British Columbia, where Kathy has lived since 2001. It tells the story of Anna Silowski, a palaeontologist, who leads a team excavating a prehistoric creature discovered in a remote part of BC, and Scott, a young local man who is drafted in to work on the project, and on whom Anna comes to rely. It’s a book about choice and possibility, and how a seemingly ‘impossible’ relationship, against all odds, transforms the lives of two people.

Kathy will be co-teaching  with me on the weekend of March 13th and 14th in London, and she will also be the Writer in Residence for the Invisible Threads project at Fermynwoods Contemporary Arts in Northants, during March.

The  Literary quarterly Ambit is celebrating its 200th issue with a 200  word poetry or prose competition –  £500 goes to the winner. See their site for more details:

http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/

Congratulations to the novelist Toby Litt, winner of the  2009 Manchester Fiction Prize, which was judged anonymously by Nicholas Royle and Sarah M Hall. See here for more details:

http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk/fiction/winners.php

The Short Review is a fantastic website devoted to the art of short form fiction. Reviews of new anthologies and single-author collections, plus interviews with authors – wide-ranging and always interesting.

They’re currently giving away 5 copies of Rebecca Miller’s new collection, Personal Velocity. Have a look:

http://www.theshortreview.com/

I was very pleased  to hear that my story ‘Rich’ was selected as one of the finalists in Narrative Magazine’s 2009 Spring Contest. It’s a website well worth visiting.

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/