via Novel Called Patience Published 4,581 Days After It Was Begun
And yes, believe it or not, Toby Litt is a previous contributor to New Short Stories. We have an embarrassment of riches, in that sense, though still seeking adverts (zero so far) for our latest edition, the eleventh in the series.
You can read “Veronika and Roger-Roger” by Toby Litt in Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 4 (2010).
“WELSH WRITER JO LLOYD WINS THE 2019 BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD WITH ‘TIMELESS’ AND ‘DEEPLY TENDER’ STORY INFLUENCED BY BREXIT, SOCIAL DIVISION AND FOLKLORE” (BBC Radio 4)
“Welsh writer Jo Lloyd has won the fourteenth BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University 2019 (NSSA) for ‘The Invisible’, a distinctive and compellingly original story. Inspired by the life of an 18th Century woman from Carnarvonshire called Martha who claimed to be friends with an invisible family living in an invisible mansion, Lloyd discovered her story by chance in the online Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Set in a close-knit community, the story is both timeless and universal, and resonates profoundly in an age where fear of outsiders and social division is rife.”
Listen: Aimee-Ffion Edwards reads “Jo Lloyd’s hypnotic tale about the fantasies people embrace to make life bearable” The Invisible by Jo Lloyd.
Read: “Welsh writer takes £15,000 prize for The Invisible, based on a real 18th-century woman who spread tales in her village” Guardian report including the text of the short story.
Interview: Jo Lloyd on Winning the 2019 BBC National Short Story Award (Wasafiri)
This news continues a series of successes this year by previous Willesden international short story prize winners. Jo Lloyd won the Willesden in 2009 with her story “Work”, which you can read in New Short Stories 3.
Read excerpts from the six short stories and bio’s of the writers, including Danielle McLaughlin who won the Willesden Herald international short story award 2013, when our judge was David Means. Link: Sunday Times
“Hanif Kureishi wrote the screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette and Le Week-End, among other films. He has published eight novels, including, most recently, The Nothing.”
The New Yorker online
Text and reading by the author in The New Yorker (limit on free access applies)
“… The main drag was the daily parade for his morbidity. Limerick, in the bone evil of its winter, and here came Con McCarthy, haunted-looking, in his enormous, suffering overcoat. The way he sidled in, with the long, pale face, and the hot, emotional eyes. …”
Read the story in full in the Irish Times.
From Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, edited by Lucy Caldwell and published by Faber & Faber. Kevin Barry’s latest book is Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate).
To celebrate the launch of the 2019 Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition, we caught up with last years winner, Louise Farr, to hear more about her work and what competitions like this mean to emerging writers. Omagh Literary Festival: Hi Louise. Tell us a bit about your winning short story, Sing to Me, and how […]
The flagship annual summer feast of fiction that keeps readers and writers delighted and hopeful respectively. See This Week In Fiction for many more short stories, interviews and readings.
‘When I started I thought I wasn’t a person with a good memory but you tap into uncanny places where you have things saved up that you didn’t know you did until you got to that level.’
Tessa Hadley in The Times (2017) via “How Tessa Hadley Writes“
“Picador has acquired a collection of short stories from “really exciting talent” Dima Alzayat. Editor Ansa Khan Khattak bought UK and Commonwealth rights for Alligator and Other Stories from Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedmann. It is scheduled for publication in 2020.” (The Bookseller)
Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview is free this week. Find out what else we’ve unlocked:
— The Paris Review (@parisreview) April 23, 2019
“Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.”
This week’s features include an interview with Elena Ferrante, a poem by Jorge Luis Borges and a story by Haruki Murakami.
New Short Stories 