The winner of the £10,000 Edge Hill Prize for a published short story collection will be announced at an award ceremony in London on Saturday November 3rd. The shortlisted authors are Tessa Hadley, Sarah Hall, Alison MacLeod, Tom Rachman and Leone Ross. There will be readings from all five collections: book your tickets at Waterstones Bookshop, Piccadilly.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice Special Issues
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 7.2 and 8.1 & 2 are all available now. 7.2 is a special issue on ‘Haunting in the Short Story’, with articles from the conference held at the University of Angers in 2015. The double issue 8. 1 & 2 contains articles from the ENSFR annual conference held at Edge Hill in 2016 on the theme ‘”Child of the Century”: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media. It also contains an exclusive translation by Lyn Marven of a story by German writer Roman Ehrlich, and an interview with him by Lyn Marven and Andrew Plowright.
9.1, a general issue, is in preparation for early 2019.
New Volume on Alice Munro
A new collection of essays on Alice Munro is out. Here is a flyer of the collection.
EU call of Cultural projects
Protest Europe
Award-winning British publishing house Comma Press, in partnership with the University of Angers, is looking to build link with other publishers, festivals and universities across Europe to partner with on an international collaboration project designed to re-engage readers and writers with people’s history and shared, common cultural heritage through a series of commissions focusing on the history of European protest. Exploring the links between different protest movements across Europe, these commissions will bring together publishers, writers, historians, activists, translators, researchers and universities to collaborate on the creation of a series of short stories, semi-fictionalising this history in a way which shows shared goals, influences and strategies.
The stories will be written by fiction writers working in close collaboration with experts (historians and living activists) who will also write short afterwords to accompany the finished stories. The stories and afterwords will be translated and published simultaneously across various language editions. The project will also host public events and develop digital materials to celebrate and better understand these pivotal moments of ‘popular resistance’ – protests which, in some small way, helped to shape modern Europe.
If you or your organisation would like to find out more about this project, email coordinator Ra Page at ra.page@commapress.co.uk.
CFP: 5th ENSFR conference: Short Fiction as Humble Fiction: 17-18-19 October 2019 – Montpellier
Call for Papers is now open for “Short Fiction as Humble Fiction“, a conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research) on 17-18-19 October 2019 at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France. Keynote speakers: Elke D’hoker (K.U. Leuven, Belgium) and Ann-Marie Einhaus (Northumbria University, UK)
The title of this conference may sound like a provocative statement. It may suggest a definition of the genre as a minor one, as has too often been the case in the history of the short story. Yet the conference has another purpose altogether. We would like to reverse the perspective and claim short fiction not exactly as a minor genre, but as a humble one. As such, what can short fiction do that the novel cannot? What can it better convey? We suggest to use the concept of the ‘humble’ as a critical tool that may help reframe and redefine short fiction, a notoriously elusive genre. How do short story writers deal with humble subjects – humble beings (the poor, the marginal, the outcasts, the disabled, etc.) and the non-human (animals, plants, objects), the ordinary, the everyday, the domestic, the mundane, the prosaic? How do they draw attention to what tends to be disregarded, neglected or socially invisible (Le Blanc) and how do they play with attention and inattention (Gardiner)? How do they contribute to an ethics and a politics of consideration (Pelluchon)? What rhetorical and stylistic devices do they use? What happens when they broach humble topics with humble tools, a bare, minimal style, for instance? How does the humble form of the short story – its brevity – fit humble topics? Does it paradoxically enhance them? Does the conjunction of the two give the short story a minor status or can it be empowering? In other words, should the humble be regarded as a synonym of ‘minor’ or as a quality and a capability (Nussbaum)?