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.
Dear all,
We are excited to announce a Save The Date for the 8th Annual ENSFR Conference. The conference will be held at the University of Artois (Northern France) on the 10-12th of June 2026. The title of the conference is: ‘In Different Shapes: the short story and its modes of circulation in magazines and newspapers’.
Keep your eyes peeled for more information and the CFP coming soon.
Dear ENSFR members, the ENSFR is running an online event on 24.06.2025 with a selection of authors from the ENSFR who have released work recently. The event will take the form of four interviews, with the four authors C.D Rose, Ailsa Cox, Sonya Moor and Sue Dawes followed by Q and A.
Running time for the event.
6:00pm to 6:25pm — Ailsa Cox interview with Paul Knowles.
6:25pm to 6:50pm — Sonya Moor interview with Livi Michael.
Break 6:50pm to 7:00pm.
7:00pm to 7:25pm — C.D Rose interview with Laura Gallon.
7:25pm to 7:50pm — Sue Dawes interviewed by Emma Kittle-Pey
7:50pm to 8:00pm notices for ENSFR Members
Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZGMxNjdmZGYtNjQyMS00MTExLWI4YjAtMzU0OGVmNDBlMmM2%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22250fe018-6207-427b-990c-acd1c951e6b3%22%7d
Information about the Authors
Ailsa Cox
Ailsa Cox is Professor Emerita in Short Fiction at Edge Hill University. Her stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and longlisted twice for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her mini-collection, Precipitation, with images by Patricia Farrell, is published by Confingo. The third edition of her book Writing Short Stories was also released in 2025. She has written books and essays on whole range of contemporary and twentieth-century short-story authors, including Alice Munro, Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry, Jon McGregor, Daisy Johnson and Tessa Hadley. Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books, co-authored with J. R. ‘Tim’ Struthers, Corinne Bigot and Catherine Sheldrick Ross, was published by EUP in 2024. Ailsa Cox is also the editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Press), Associate Director of ENSFR and the founder of the Edge Hill Prize. She is based in Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
Precipitation
Set mostly in North West England, with excursions to Wales, Paris and the Arabian desert, the three long stories in Precipitation map the inner and outer world of their characters, excavating layers of time and memory. Two of the stories take place on the fictional street of Bethel Brow, where a grandmother nurses a long-held griev-ance, while two young incomers live the dream of a house in the country. In the third, the thwarted ambitions of a disappointed novelist take him on an imaginary journey. They hinge upon those small moments that can change your life forever – a missed train, a turn in the weather, or a puzzling encounter with a neighbour.
C.D Rose
C.D. Rose is the author of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, The Blind Accordionist, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, and the forthcoming novel We Live Here Now. He holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from Edge Hill University. Originally from Manchester, he has lived in many different places, but now lives in the north of England. He is currently working on a paratopian gazetteer of the Upper Calder Valley, and a musical.
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a collection of nineteen pieces which tell the stories of forgotten photographers, lost travellers, missing writers and distracted philosophers, among others. The book was described as being (almost) ‘Kafka-esque’ by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize in 2025.
Sonya Moor
Sonya Moor writes, reads and translates short fiction. Her translation of Albertine Sarrazin’s The Crib and Other Stories is published by Cōnfingō, as is her collection The Comet and Other Stories. Her stories are widely published in literary reviews and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2024 and Best British Short Stories 2022, and recognised for awards such as the Cinnamon Literature Award, Seán O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition and Bridport Short Story Prize. As a PhD candidate, she is researching word–image relations in hybrid short fiction. With Livi Michael, she coproduces Small Pleasures, the podcast about great short stories and greatness in the short story form.
www.sonyamoor.com.
The Crib and Other Stories, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Sonya Moor is published by Confingo.
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. Here, Sarrazin turns her singular eye on the prison environment, charting the cruelties, small kindnesses, constraints and paradoxical freedoms of daily life in prison. By turns astute, tender and wryly humorous, Sarrazin presents a panorama ranging from the dangers of ‘favours’ and clandestine letters, to the delights of illicit coffee and self-imposed creative limits. Sarrazin’s stories swoop the quotidian into the epic, as officers, inmates, and alter egos play out, in the small world of the prison, their comédie humaine. Against this backdrop emerges Sarrazin’s own personal battle: to be, and express, herself.
Sue Dawes
Sue Dawes has a PhD in Creative Writing, with a focus on new ways to communicate gender in speculative fiction. She writes across genres: short stories, flash fiction, and experiments with Japanese short form poetry. When not writing, Sue teaches part-time at Essex University, is a freelance structural editor and mentor at The Writers Company, volunteers as a TEFL teacher with Exploring Educational Opportunities, and is a career.
The Mune
A GROUP OF VICTORIAN WOMEN, SHIPWRECKED ON AN ISLAND IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE, FIGHT FOR CHANGE.
Thirty “surplus” mothers from asylums, workhouses and the streets of Victorian England are shipwrecked on an island in an alternate universe. To survive, they must create a new society amid the lethal black sands and mysterious beasts. How will they shake off the patriarchal chains that bound them and raise their children to be free? How will Betty, who longs to be back under the guidance of her master, survive as the community evolves? And who is watching them?
The ENSFR working alongside writers from Essex’s 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 up to Seven-hundred-and-fifty words in length. The writers at the end of the event read the piece of flash fiction that they had produced to ENSFR’s members.
Read more about the event alongside extracts of the flash fiction produced from the event in an upcoming article in the Journal of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice.
I was very grateful (and shocked) to win the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction for my story ‘Late Velvet’. The prize is run by Comma Press and the University of Central Lancashire, and this year the theme was ‘the unspoken’. The judges were Alison Moore, Joseph Hunter, Robert Duggan, and Jacques Tsiantar.
The shortlisted stories – including those by runners-up Iain Rowan and Laura Theis – will be published in an e-book, which I’m really looking forward to reading.
I didn’t know Dinesh Allirajah, but I know of the amazing work he did in literature and the arts. I’ve been reading the stories in his collected works, too (Scent, Comma Press, 2016). I am honoured to win an award bearing his name.
I dedicated this bit of good fortune to the memory of my late mother-in-law, Ignês – an insightful reader and a generous and brilliant person.
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 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.
2. 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 story-telling 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.
3. 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.