The European Network for Short Fiction Research was established in 2013 with the aim of fostering and promoting the study of short fiction in European universities and in interaction with short fiction writers. After an inaugural meeting early in 2014, the ENSFR has organized annual conferences as well as sponsored several other study days and events. This website aims to be an interactive platform for sharing research, expertise, ideas and information about short fiction in its diversity of linguistic traditions and forms.
Submissions are now open to the Scratch A4 Summer ’25
1000 word short story competition!
Come and explore the rich and exhilarating possibilities of the short, short story – the six shortlisted writers reading their stories in the biannual event in Soho, London in June.
This year’s judges are:
Denise Rose Hansen, editorial director at Penguin Books.
Liv Bignold, literary agent at C&W literary agency.
Tom Conaghan, publisher of Scratch Books.
Submissions close on 26th April.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2 contains selected articles from the 2023 ENSFR conference on Landscape and Temporality plus an interview with writer Thomas Morris and a range of book reviews. Guest editors are Paul Knowles, Ana Garcia-Soriano and Madeleine Sinclair. Topics and authors covered include Inuit short stories, Hungarian short stories, short fiction and domestic space, short fiction and dementia, Theophile Gautier, M.R. James, Michel Faber. Plus an iconoclastic new essay from Jon McGregor. And book reviews. Thanks to everyone involved, including the diligent and supportive peer reviewers.
A second volume will follow shortly.
5-7 November 2025 (FREE online only conference)
Deadline for submissions, 20 June 2025
Letters have been described in one evocative image as ‘a form in flight’ (Liz Stanley). Seeking to appreciate more fully such descriptions and their importance for literary studies, we aim to bring together in this online event scholars, writers and researchers interested in exploring letters and literature from the sixteenth century to the present day.
This FREE 3-day online international conference’s broad focus is the letter in its material and textual forms, as manifested across literary history—from the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the golden age of epistolary fiction, Kate Thomas’ ‘postal plots’ of the nineteenth century, and what Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have identified as an Epistolary Renaissance in the work of 21st century writers. Participants are encouraged to engage with this theme in ways including but not limited to the following questions/topics:
Letters have also been described as the ‘epistolary form of gift exchange’ (Stanley). We seek contributions investigating letters as makers and markers of creative communities, including but not limited to the following topics:
Creative responses to all these issues are very much welcomed.
And with a keen eye on issues of preservation and representation, we are interested to hear too from those working on the editing of writers’ letters (print and digital), and on letters in the archives.
We welcome individual paper presentations or round table discussions in any of the following formats:
To propose a paper, response or panel to present at the conference, please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (50 words) to Sara Haslam by 20 June 2025. We welcome proposals from individuals at all stages of their academic careers, including graduate students, and dedicated graduate student panels are anticipated for the event. We will aim to inform you of the outcome of your proposal submission by 30 July 2025. The conference will be FREE to attend, but registration in advance will be required. A Journal Special Issue is a planned outcome.
This conference is organised by colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) together with colleagues in Languages and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies) at The Open University. The conference is supported by OpenARC, The Open University’s Arts Research Centre in the School of Arts and Humanities, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and by the History of Books and Reading (HOBAR), Contemporary Cultures of Writing, Digital Humanities, and Literature and Politics research groups in the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) at the Open University.
Conference Lead Organiser: Sara Haslam
Programme Committee members: Francesca Benatti; Daria Chernysheva; Delia da Sousa Correa; Rachele De Felice; Jonathan Gibson; Ed Hogan; Peg Katritzky; Lania Knight; Philip Seargeant; Jennifer Shepherd; Emma Sweeney; Shafquat Towheed; Nicola Watson; Anne Wetherilt.
Conference website: https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/
Visual 1: Detail from letter, Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Bath, 12 May 1801. Morgan Library and Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia.
Visual 2: Detail from Reginald Marsh “Unloading the Mail”. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Full scale image available at https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.24950. No known copyright restriction.
Why did you choose to work on short fiction in your PhD thesis?During an MA at Durham University, I became interested in the genre’s marginality in the context of literary production. I encountered an interesting quote from J.G. Ballard which got me thinking about the hierarchy of genres and the unevenness of literary space. In an introduction to a collection, he describes short stories as the “loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit” (Ballard 2023: 80). My PhD research was inspired by this conceptualization of the short story as a kind of literary loose change in the “treasury of fiction” – a treasury largely dominated by the privileged genre of the novel. It worked to highlight the distinct political affordances of short fictional forms emerging in the twenty-first century.
I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this, but for me, the best short stories work to defamiliarize reality as we know it. I’m thinking, for example, about Julio Cortázar’s description of the “peculiar” atmosphere of the short form in “Aspects of the Short Story”. For Cortázar, while the novel “progressively accumulates effects upon the reader”, the short story paradoxically illuminates – through its inherent brevity – something “beyond itself” (Cortázar 1980: 8-12). I’m interested in writers who experiment with the short story as a distinct site of surrealist disruption, which potentially illuminates human experience, or catalyzes political thought.
During my PhD research at University of Warwick, I was really struck by the efflorescence of short forms emerging in the twenty-first century which push the aesthetics of brevity to its literary extreme, such as digital fiction and flash fiction. I’m excited to read future research which unpacks the possibilities offered by these experimental subgenres, as they respond to our fragmentary yet hyper-connected modern world.
References
Ballard, J. G. (2023). Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007. United Kingdom: MIT Press.
Cortázar, Julio. (1980). ‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’, trans. By Aden Hayes, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature Culture and Theory, 38:1, p. 8-18.
Maddie is an Early Career Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick, UK. She has recently completed her Wolfson Foundation funded doctoral research in English and Comparative Literary Studies, which focused on world literature, feminist studies, and the politics of the short story in the twenty-first century.
Salt Press has recently published Best British Short Stories 2024, edited by Nicholas Royle. It features stories by Alan Beard, Kevin Boniface, Paul Brownsey, Claire Carroll, ECM Cheung, Jonathan Coe, Rosie Garland, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Timothy Jarvis, Cynan Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Sonya Moor, Alison Moore, Gregory Norminton, Nicholas Royle, Cherise Saywell, Kamila Shamsie, Ben Tufnell, Charlotte Turnbull and Cate West.
