Issue 1 | 12 December 2024
ENSFR Newsletter
A quarterly update from the European Network for Short Fiction Research
Issue 1 | 12 December 2024
Welcome
The ENSFR was created as a joint initiative of researchers at Edge Hill University, Université d’Angers and the University of Leuven. We’ve now been joined by many other colleagues from all over Europe. Our broad aim is to foster and promote research on short fiction across different countries and institutions.
We aim to provide a forum and resources for European-based researchers into the practice, criticism and transmission of short fiction in its diversity of forms, and to facilitate collaboration in both critical and practice-led research. We hold regular conferences on short fiction, hosted in different universities across Europe, and we facilitate and support many other conferences, workshops and seminars in the field of short-fiction studies.
In this newsletter, we share updates from across the short-story landscape, including an exclusive flash interview with Nicholas Royle, a spotlight on the PhD research of Maddie Sinclair, and links to highlighted features on our website.
If you have something to tell us about, whether it’s a publication, a conference or any short-story related news, please get in touch.
Need to know | Calls for papers | Conferences | Events
Call for contributions: The Journal for the Short Story in English announces a special issue: ‘Blue Short Stories’, guest edited by: Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie.
Call for contributions: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice announces a special issue for 2026, guest edited by Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka, University of Debrecen: ‘Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives’.
The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland, June 2025.
The European Association for American Studies will mark the centenary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth with a conference in Toruń, Poland, in March 2025.
Call for contributions: Eastern Europe: Translation, Dissemination, Reception announces a special issue on Thomas Pynchon, guest edited by Sergej Macura, University of Belgrade, and Gábor Tamás Molnár, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Call for papers: The Katherine Mansfield Society is accepting papers for their conference entitled ‘Placing Katherine Mansfield’ at the University of Birmingham, 1–3 July 2025.
Need to read | New publications
Confingo opens pre-orders for the much awaited Precipitation, by Ailsa Cox, with images by Patricia Farrell.
Journal of the Short Story in English releases a special issue for its 40th anniversary, and another on Edward P. Jones.
Oxford University Press publishes Marta Fossati’s acclaimed The South African Short Story in English, 1920-2010.
Edinburgh University Press releases Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices, by J.R (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox, Corrine Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross – an engaging and authoritative assessment of the middle period in the career of Alice Munro, and an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice vol. 14.1 has been published with a special section on The Short Story and Ecology, guest edited by A. J. Ashworth and Aleix Tura Vecino.
Salt Press has recently published Best British Short Stories 2024, edited by Nicholas Royle.
In the know | Interviews | Podcasts
Short fiction in a flash: a bite-size interview with Nicholas Royle, by Sonya Moor
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 a lot, but not, it seemed, at short stories. But then I reread Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – ‘life is short and brutal’ – and here they came. Actual tears.
You have a nine-hour train journey and can take one short story to read, several times over – which do you choose?
Maybe that very short Kafka story – is it ‘Before the Law’? – that everyone rather annoyingly says is better than all the longer, more obvious Kafka stories, to see if I can work out what they’re on about. Or Alison Moore’s ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’, to try to work out exactly how she creates that sense of dread. Or Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – it’s good to cry on a long journey.
Describe your writing space, and your ideal writing space?
Seat 48, coach A, the so-called Quiet Zone, on the Manchester–London train. Seats 47 and 48 are reserved for cyclists, but few turn up. The Quiet Zone ‘rules’ are often broken, but I use earphones and listen to carefully chosen music that blocks other people’s noise without disturbing anyone and I write. My ideal writing space could be recreated if the café on the corner of Belgrade Road in Stoke Newington were to reopen.
Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press.
To spotlight the work of post-graduate scholars within ENSFR, Ines Gstrein (Innsbruck) conducts a series of interviews with PhD students and ECRs. In the first instalment, Maddie Sinclair (Warwick) offers fascinating insights into her PhD research on twenty-first century short fiction. The full interview can be accessed here. Congratulations to Dr Maddie Sinclair for successfully defending her PhD!
Congratulations to ENSFR member Joe Bedford, winner of the 2024 Bridport Prize for short fiction, with his story ‘Zanzibar Blue’.
In Small Pleasures, the podcast on great short stories and greatness in the short-story form, Tom Conaghan shares with Livi Michael and Sonya Moor his insights on publishing short fiction, and his appreciation of Mahreen Sohail’s story ‘Hair’, featured in Reverse Engineering published by Scratch Books.
Join the ENSFR reading group! Coordinated by Ines Gstrein, University of Innsbruck, Maddie Sinclair, University of Warwick, and Paul Knowles, University of Manchester, the group comes together monthly to discuss classic and new short fiction.
Upcoming…
Be sure to catch our next issue – we’ll share news of the 2026 ENSFR conference, exclusive interviews, and more.
Do reach out with any news you’d like to share, and don’t forget to follow us on social media. Contact information: ensfr@contact.univ-angers.fr or ensfrcg@gmail.com
Thank you for reading and wishing you all the best for the holiday season,
The ENSFR Newsletter Team