Issue 2 | 18 June 2025
ENSFR Newsletter
A biannual update from the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR)
Issue 2 | 18 June 2025
Welcome
The ENSFR was created as a joint initiative of researchers at Edge Hill University, the University of 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 Vesna Main, a spotlight on the Early Career Researcher (ECR) and author Emma Kittle-Pey, and links to highlighted features on our website.
If you have something to tell us about, whether it’s a publication, conference or any short-story related news, please get in touch.
Need to know | Calls for papers | Conferences | Events
On 8 May 2025, the ENSFR working alongside writers from Essex University (UK), writers from the writing school at Innsbruck University (Austria) and writers from the PesText festival (Hungary) took part in a Flash in Translation Event. The event involved eight writers working in collaborative pairs from across the three participating countries to each produce a piece of Flash Fiction.
The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland on 17–21 June 2025.
Online event: An Evening with ENSFR Authors, 24 June 2025 at 19:00–21:00 (Central European Summer Time)/18:00–20:00 (British Summer Time), featuring interviews with Ailsa Cox, Sonya Moor, Sue Dawes and C.D Rose.
The Ecological Futurity Conference will take place in-person and online at the University of Manchester on 27 June 2025, organized by the ENSFR, Paul Knowles (University of Manchester) and Madeleine Sinclair (University of Warwick).
The Katherine Mansfield Society is holding its conference entitled ‘Placing Katherine Mansfield’ at the University of Birmingham on 1–3 July 2025.
In the context of the Project in Medical Humanities, the creative journal Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health is accepting texts, images, and videos attentive to life, in its fullness and fragility, in the following categories: Poetry; fiction; literary non-fiction; graphic narrative; visual arts; video; and reviews. Deadline 30 June 2025.
Papers are being accepted for the online conference Letters and Literature 1500–2025: Histories, Forms, Communities, organized by the Open University on 5–7 November 2025.
The Open University Centre for Research into Gender and Otherness in the Humanities has released its call for papers for the 6th Annual GOTH Symposium at the Open University on 15 May 2026.
Save the date for the 8th annual ENSFR conference ‘In Different Shapes: The Short Story and its Modes of Circulation in Magazines and Newspapers’/‘Sous différentes formes: La nouvelle et ses modes de circulation dans les magazines et les journaux’, which will be held at the University of Artois, France on 10–12 June 2026. (Thanks to Gérald Préher and his team for organising!)
Save the date for ‘The American Shorts’, a conference organized by Society for the Study of the American Short Story and affiliated with the ENSFR, which will be held at the Lisbon University campus, 29–31 October 2026. (Thanks to Bernardo Manzoni Palmeirim and his team for organising!)
Need to read | New publications
Routledge has released the third edition of Writing Short Stories by Ailsa Cox who, ‘Guides readers through key aspects of the craft, providing a variety of case studies of classic and contemporary core texts.’
Journal of the Short Story in English released vol. 83, a double issue with a Special Section: Creative and Critical Responses to Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction, guest edited by Paul Anthony Knowles, Madeline Sinclair and Ana García-Soriano, and a General Section: Borders and Border Crossings, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Gérald Préher.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2 has been published, containing 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 Anthony Knowles, Madeleine Sinclair and Ana García-Soriano.
Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction: Magnitudes of Telling by Paul Delaney has been published by Routledge: ‘This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland. More specifically, it discusses the cultural, material, and ideological usages of the short form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaging with the forces that have helped to shape the production, dissemination, and reception of short stories over the last few decades in Ireland.’
Confingo has published The Crib and Other Stories, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Sonya Moor. ‘These short stories, which appear in English for the first time, were composed for the most part in prison, before Sarrazin’s novels were published to international acclaim in 1965.’
Istros Books has published fifteen of Mircea Eliade’s short stories in a new collection entitled Time, Death, and the Unspeakable Secret, translated from Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts and edited by Bryan Rennie.
In the know | Interviews | Podcasts
Short fiction in a flash: A bite-size interview with Vesna Main, by Sonya Moor
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 dark. I experiment with words and use them sparingly. Less is more. The last request: Let me be a chameleon and turn into colours as yet unseen.
How do short stories relate, if at all, to borderless fiction?
I studied Comparative Literature because I believe that the best literature surpasses national divisions and political borders. Literature is too important to be restricted by what are often arbitrary partitions. Short stories can be universal because they are focused and can exist outside period and location. That makes it easier than any other form for the short story to move between languages and cultures. Write short story, can translate, will travel.
Which short story last made you jealous and why?
I am jealous of the writers who succeed in what I am trying to do, which is to have a recognisable style while making each text formally different. Lydia Davis always impresses, as does Gabriel Josipovici. His collection Heart’s Wings (2010) offers a range of forms, each story a world of its own. If you force me to name just one, then it is ‘Mobius the Stripper’. It is profound, funny and clever.
Vesna Main has published several novels – each stylistically different – and a collection of short stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt, 2017). Two of her stories have been selected for Best British Short Stories (Salt 2017, 2019).
Her latest novel, Waiting for A Party (Salt 2024) is a narrative told by a ninety-two-year-old woman longing for affection and sexual intimacy.
[References: ‘Mobius the Stripper’ is collected in Josipovici, Gabriel, Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974) and Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010).]
Spotlight PhD/ECR Interview Series: Emma Kittle-Pey, interviewed by Ines Gstrein
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 example, when they can’t rely on him Gregor’s family must become active, so they become active. In my book the single mother must do everything, so she learns to do everything.
What can people gain by reading more short stories?
When students join my creative writing classes, they often say they have difficulty finishing stories. Oral storytelling and reading short fiction means that you are thinking about stories as a whole. It’s a great way to learn about writing or the ideas you’re interested in. I’m currently reading and thinking about Kate Atkinson’s story ‘The Void’ in her linked collection Normal Rules Don’t Apply and Katy Wimhurst’s An Orchid in My Belly Button.
You bring a researcher-author perspective to short fiction. How do your creative and academic writing relate to each other?
I wanted to write a new story for the mother sacrificed to the plot in the film Muriel’s Wedding. This negative treatment of middle-aged women is shown in the story ‘Lentils and Lilies’ by Helen Simpson. I explored Bakhtin’s dialogism, invitational rhetoric and polyvocality, contemporary novel composition and short-story cycles which value and include the older mother’s perspective, e.g. Girl, Woman, Other or The Wren, The Wren. This influenced the structure of my novel.
Dr Emma Kittle-Pey has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Essex. Her thesis is a creative/critical exploration of place and gender in contemporary fiction. The novel is a (grand)mother-daughter relationship set in coastal Essex. The reflective commentary focuses on place, specifically local coastal communities, the evolution of the mother-daughter plot, working women and women who write, writing short fiction and using short stories in longer form fiction.
Emma has had two collections published by Patrician Press and has read her short fiction nationally and internationally. She teaches at the University of Essex, ACL Essex, at a primary school, and works on projects for Essex Book Festival. She is the founder and curator of Colchester WriteNight, a popular monthly community writing event.
Congratulations to Ed Hogan for winning the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction for his story ‘Late Velvet’!
Small Pleasures Podcast Episode 19: In the latest episode, Livi Michael and Sonya Moor look at two marvels of short fiction – Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs Fox’ and Jackie Kay’s ‘My Daughter the Fox’. Hall and Kay use elements of realism to ask outrageous questions: What happens when a man’s wife becomes a fox? Or when a woman gives birth to a fox cub? By setting the wild figure of a fox in domestic spaces, Hall and Kay raise unsettling questions about what it means to be a mother, for a man to love his wife – and our fraught relationship with the natural world.
Join the ENSFR reading group! Coordinated by Ines Gstrein (University of Innsbruck), Paul Knowles (University of Manchester), and Maddie Sinclair (University of Warwick), the group comes together monthly to discuss classic and new short fiction. The final meeting this semester will take place on 23 June 2025.
Upcoming…
Over the summer, we’ll be updating the member directory and website. Please be on the lookout for an email concerning the update of your details in the member directory, and please be patient with us, as the website may not function properly at times during the summer months.
Be sure to catch our next issue – we’ll share more 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 media (Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn).