Call for Articles on W. Somerset Maugham

Special Issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE 88, Spring 2027) and another publication
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2025

Guest Editors
Xavier Lachazette (Le Mans Université, France), Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne Université, France) et Nicole Cloarec (Université de Rennes, France)

Presentation
Following “How Good Maugham Was: A Critical Reassessment”, the W. Somerset Maugham conference that we organised last March in Le Mans, we are planning two publications.
One will be dedicated to Maugham’s short stories, and published in Issue 88 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (Spring 2027).
The other will focus on any other aspect of Maugham’s life or multifaceted works (novels, theatre, essays, travel diaries, etc.), to be published in a separate volume.
In addition to the presentations from the abovementioned conference, we are issuing a call for articles on any aspect of Maugham’s works or life.

Framework Text
The full framework text for our conference is still available on our SciencesConf website.
It will help prospective contributors understand the literary reassessment of Maugham’s works and life that these publications aim to achieve.

Practical Details
• Proposals (300-400 words) should be sent to maugham-le-mans@sciencesconf.org by 15 November 2025, together with a short bio-bibliography (100-150 words).
• Full articles will be due by 15 January 2026 and should be between 45,000 and 48,000 characters (spaces included).
• The style sheet and guidelines for authors are available on the JSSE website: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/234.

Contact
We will be more than happy to answer any questions about article ideas or to provide additional information.
Please use the following alias to contact all three of us: maugham-le-mans@sciencesconf.org.

INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER & CEO OF COMMA PRESS

We are delighted to invite you to an interview with Ra Page, the CEO and Founder of Comma Press, on Monday 13th October, at 6pm (UK time), via Teams (see link below).

Founded in 2007, Comma Press is a non-profit publishing house based in Manchester, UK, that publishes short story anthologies and single-author collections. Its initial purpose was to redress the dearth of short story publishing opportunities in the UK, bringing award-winning writers like David Constantine Comma Press DC , Sara Maitland Comma Press SM and Adam Marek Comma Press AM to new audiences. Comma Press’s titles and authors have won multiple awards ranging from the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award to the BBC National Short Story Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Caine Prize, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Its podcast was shortlisted for the 2019 FutureBook Award, Podcast of the Year, and, as a publisher, it won the 2020 Small Press of the Year (Northern Region) at The Bookseller’s British Book Awards. Comma has published two subsequent Nobel Prize winners; it has sold rights to its titles into over 30 languages, sold 7 titles to Audible, seen over 60 stories broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and had two stories adapted for the big screen.

Its founder and CEO, Ra Page, has edited and co-edited many anthologies, including Resist: Stories of Uprising (2019), The New Uncanny (2008), Protest: Stories of Resistance (2017), The American Way (2020), and The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories (Penguin, 1999). He has coordinated a number of publisher development initiatives, including Literature Northwest (2004-2013), and the Northern Fiction Alliance (2016-present). He is a former journalist and has also worked in film exhibition and production.

You can access the event here: Comma Press Interview

We look forward to seeing you there!

The ENSFR Communication team

The 8th Annual ENSFR Conference (University of Artois, June 10-12, 2026)

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 and newspapers (as opposed to stories that were later collected in book form), adapted into film or into longer works of fiction (as is often the case with The New Yorker). Panelists may also work on any short form to be found in magazines (commercials, letters to the editor, notes…) as well as illustrated stories—the illustrations providing yet another short story from to explore.

Certain magazines target a specific audience, and it could be stimulating to reflect upon writers’ ability to please (at least on the surface) literary editors. In the nineteenth century, stories were often referred to as “articles,” “tales” or “sketches”—how does this influence our understanding of the text? What are the differences between stories printed in magazines and those printed in newspapers?

The conference will give us an opportunity to discuss magazine publication with several authors and see how magazine and newspaper publication has evolved since its earliest forms.

Writers Taking Part in The Writers of the ENSFR Event

Lisa Blower

Lisa Blower is the winner of the 2025 V.S Pritchard prize with her short story Blessings in Burslem

In 2009, her short story Broken Crockery won the Guardian Weekend’s summer short fiction special.She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award for her story Barmouth in 2013.

Her debut novel Sitting Ducks was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Arnold Bennet Boom Prize in 2017. Blower’s debut short story collection, It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s, published in 2019 is set in Stoke-on-Trent. It won the Arnold Bennett Book Prize and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She published the novel Pondweed in 2020.

Ed Hogan

Ed Hogan is from Derby. His five novels include Blackmoor, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and The Electric. His recent short stories have won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize, the Galley Beggar Press Prize, and he is currently shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award 2025. Ed works for the Open University, and lives in Brighton.

Sarah Schofield

Sarah Schofield’s stories have been published in Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt) Lemistry, Bio-Punk, Thought X, Beta Life, Spindles and Conradology (all Comma Press) Spilling Ink Flash Fiction Anthology, Synaesthesia Magazine, Lakeview International Journal, Woman’s Weekly, Morning Star, Hinterland magazine and others. She has been shortlisted on the Bridport and the Guardian Travel Writing Competition and won the Orange New Voices Prize, Writer’s Inc and The Calderdale Fiction Prize. An excerpt from her story ‘The Bactogarden’ featured on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book. Her debut short story collection, Safely Gathered In was published in November 2021 and she is currently working on her second collection.

Karitas Hrundar Palsdottir

Karítas is the first person from Iceland to hold a PhD in creative writing. She is a visiting research fellow at the University of East Anglia and just published her first monograph Readaptation Narratives in Sojourner Literature with Palgrave Macmillan. Reykjavik Literary Agency (RLA) is now seeking publication for her short story collection Neither Nor Both And which, like the monograph, explores cross-cultural readaptation. Moreover, Karítas is a pioneer in Icelandic easy language fiction and has published three flash fiction collections that promote linguistic and cultural literacy in Iceland.

Joe Bedford

Joe Bedford is an author from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and have won several awards, including the Bridport Prize 2024. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People was published by Parthian Books in 2023.

Georgina Parfitt

Georgina grew up in Norfolk, England. She moved to the United States at 19, to Harvard University, where she studied fiction with Amy Hempel and started to think of the short story as a place she could happily live. She went on to gain her MFA at Boston University and to teach undergraduates there. She now writes and teaches in Liverpool. She has published stories and essays in The Atlantic, The Dublin Review, Ambit, Washington Square Review, Granta, and in Best British Short Stories 2023. She has been writer-in-residence at the H J Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, USA, and at Villa Sarkia in Finland.

A. J, Ashworth

A. J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize, was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The TLS said of her work: ‘A. J. Ashworth’s first collection of short stories displays impressive versatility. She treats each of her characters to their own narrative timbre – and the stories do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution.’

She is also the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, in aid of The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has won funding such as an Arts Council England grant, a Society of Authors K. Blundell Trust Award and, most recently, a Society of Authors Authors’ Foundation grant. She has previously won the Baltic Writing Residency in Scotland and was also a Hawthornden Fellow. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, and has worked as an associate lecturer there as well as at Lancaster University. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice.

Writers of the ENSFR Event (25.09.2026)

Dear ENSFR members,

We are excited to announce that the ENSFR is launching a new writing group in September (all welcome to join). To celebrate we have an organized a writers of the ENSFR event to showcase the brilliant work that writers in the network are producing.

The writers speaking at the event are Ed Hogan, A.J Ashworth, Lisa Blower, Sarah Schofield, Joe Bedford, Georgina Parfitt and Karitas Palsdottir.

The event will be on the Thursday 25th of September, between 7 and 9 PM UK Time. Please come along and show your support for the writers of the Network.

You can attend the event on the link below.

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MTVkNzhkZmQtNDNjZi00YzNhLWJhZTYtNWQwOGUxNjhlZTNi%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 [teams.microsoft.com]

Please find the timetable for the event below

EH: 7:00-7:15
GP: 7 :15- 7:30
SS 7-30-7:45
AA 7:45-8:00
Break 8:00-815.
LB 8:15-8:30
KP 8:30 -8:45
JB 8:45-9:00

Best Wishes,

The ENSFR Communication Team