Dear ENSFR Members, Following the ideas initiated at the Leuven conference in 2017 on the short story, its contexts and co-texts, the 2026 ENSFR conference will be devoted to short forms appearing in magazines and newspapers. The conference will consider any story printed in such media but also stories that were solely published in magazines…
1. Can you remember the first short story you ever read? I remember thinking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was ridiculous. Later I fell in love with short fiction and thought differently about Kafka’s work, considering story but also themes related to society, working life and family. Ideas or moments in reading often inspire my writing. For…
What can short stories expect from readers? I expect you to remember that I am not a novel. If I say, ‘the queen died, then the king died of grief’, don’t ask what happened before or after. I shine a light on the particular, an event, a character, a time. The rest remains in the…
Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health welcomes words and images attentive to life, in its fullness and its fragility. For it is mainly in moments of heightened awareness of our vulnerability, and of the vulnerability of the world we inhabit, that life invites us to slow down, listen, look, feel, and try to find…
Which short-story last made you cry – for good reasons? Good question, because I thought I would be able to answer it easily. I thought about anthologies and collections and favourite writers and came up blank. I reread Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Blackness’ and remained dry eyed. The short story is my favourite form, and I cry…
On November 6, 2025, the ENSFR and PesText – International Literary and Cultural Festival hosted an online workshop on “Flash in Translation: Uncanny Objects”. The event was jointly organised by Robert Smid, Paul Knowles, Ines Gstrein and Ildikó Hepp. Eleven writers from four countries – Hungary, Austria, the United Kingdom and France – were invited…