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Call for Papers for Ecological Futurity in Short Fiction Conference: 27th of June 2025.

A hybrid conference convened by the University of Warwick and Manchester in partnership with the European Network for Short Fiction Research.

We are excited to announce this call for papers on Ecological Futurity in ShortFiction. We welcome papers that consider the ways in which short fiction envisions radical alternative futures to a world threatened by socio-ecological crisis.

Key critical research that has recently been done in the field of Ecological Futurity revolves around dystopian and utopian depictions of humanity’s future. In Worlds Without US: Some Types of Disanthropy, for instance, Greg Garrad examines depictions of humanity’s extinction, considering the ways in which writers, artists and filmmakers have imagined a world, ‘completely and finally without people’, and the challenges these disanthropic representations pose to anthropocentric hierarchies and privilege.1 In contrast, Thom Van Dorren, Eben Kirsky and Ursula Münster consider in their introduction on Multispecies Studies, the ways in which cobecoming encourages, ‘the exchange and emergence of meanings’, between participants as they become immersed, ‘in webs of signification’, that might be, ‘linguistic, gestural, biochemical, and more’, and how these cobecoming relationships could foster greater harmony between the human and the more-than-human world in the future.2 These two diverging representations on the future of humanity are at the heart of what Deborah Lilley identifies as a New Pastoral movement in contemporary fiction:‘where the themes and conventions of the pastoral are being reimagined and reshaped in response to environmental crises’.3 This body of contemporary research highlights how studies into Ecological Futurity are shining a light on the political, economic and environmental systems in play in the current-day and-age, and how they will shape humanity’s future.

This conference foregrounds the role of short fictional forms in providing imaginative access into ecological futures. We are inviting abstracts of 450 words, including a 150-word bio on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

· Utopian Futures in short fiction
· Post-Apocalyptic/ Dystopian Imaginaries
· Short Fiction, Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities
· Speculative Fiction, Sci-Fi, and Climate Change
· Feminism and ecological futurity
· Indigenous Knowledge and Ecology
· Technological Innovations
· Queer futurity/ alternative reproductive futures
.The Weird tale in the twenty-first century
· The folktale and environmental folklore

The Ecological Futurity Conference will take place in-person and online at the University of Manchester on the 27th of June 2025. Deadline for abstracts: 2nd May 2025. To be sent to ensfrcg@gmail.com

Organisers: Paul Knowles (University of Manchester), Madeleine Sinclair (University of Warwick) and the ENSFR Network.

References 

1 ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy’, Greg Garrard, SubStance (2012), 41.1, 127, 40-60, p.41.
2  Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’, Thom Van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, Ursula Münster, Environmental Humanities (2016), 8.1, 1-23, p.2.
3 Deborah Lilley, The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing (Oxon, Routledge, 2020), p.156.

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Confingo Publishing is launching The Crib and Other Stories, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Sonya Moor.

Confingo Publishing is launching 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. 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.

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Scratch A4 Summer 25 Competition!

 

Submissions are now open to the Scratch A4 Summer ’25

1000 word short story competition!

Come and explore the rich and exhilarating possibilities of the short, short story – the six shortlisted writers reading their stories in the biannual event in Soho, London in June.

 

This year’s judges are:

Denise Rose Hansen, editorial director at Penguin Books.

Liv Bignold, literary agent at C&W literary agency.

Tom Conaghan, publisher of Scratch Books.

 

Submissions close on 26th April.

More information on submissions here.

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Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2 Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2   contains 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 Knowles, Ana Garcia-Soriano and Madeleine Sinclair. Topics and authors covered include Inuit short stories, Hungarian short stories, short fiction and domestic space, short fiction and dementia, Theophile Gautier, M.R. James, Michel Faber. Plus an iconoclastic new essay from Jon McGregor. And book reviews. Thanks to everyone involved, including the diligent and supportive peer reviewers.

A second volume will follow shortly.

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Call for Papers: ‘Letters and Literature 1500-2025: histories, forms, communities’

5-7 November 2025 (FREE online only conference)

Deadline for submissions, 20 June 2025

Letters have been described in one evocative image as ‘a form in flight’ (Liz Stanley). Seeking to appreciate more fully such descriptions and their importance for literary studies, we aim to bring together in this online event scholars, writers and researchers interested in exploring letters and literature from the sixteenth century to the present day.

This FREE 3-day online international conference’s broad focus is the letter in its material and textual forms, as manifested across literary history­—from the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the golden age of epistolary fiction, Kate Thomas’ ‘postal plots’ of the nineteenth century, and what Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have identified as an Epistolary Renaissance in the work of 21st century writers. Participants are encouraged to engage with this theme in ways including but not limited to the following questions/topics:

  • how, where and why do letters feature in literary texts and literary communities?
  • what strategies of narrative, plot, or character do they illustrate and deploy?
  • the role of materiality in literary letters
  • letters as vehicles for exploring writers’ ideas about the public and the private, absence and presence, the global and the local, and/or notions of authenticity and the ‘authentic self’
  • letters and literary reputations
  • letter writing manuals and the development of literary history
  • what counts as a letter in twenty-first century narratives?

Letters have also been described as the ‘epistolary form of gift exchange’ (Stanley). We seek contributions investigating letters as makers and markers of creative communities, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • the role of letters in writers’ networks
  • imagined letters/letters unsent
  • writers’ letters from prison
  • representation or employment of letters in diasporic/migrant epistolary narratives

Creative responses to all these issues are very much welcomed.

And with a keen eye on issues of preservation and representation, we are interested to hear too from those working on the editing of writers’ letters (print and digital), and on letters in the archives.

We welcome individual paper presentations or round table discussions in any of the following formats:

  • Individual paper (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words)
  • Individual lightning talk (7 minutes speaking time/1000 words)
  • Round table panel, up to 5 participants (40 minutes speaking time in total)
  • Creative writing responses or creative/critical responses to conference themes (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words).

To propose a paper, response or panel to present at the conference, please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (50 words) to Sara Haslam by 20 June 2025. We welcome proposals from individuals at all stages of their academic careers, including graduate students, and dedicated graduate student panels are anticipated for the event. We will aim to inform you of the outcome of your proposal submission by 30 July 2025. The conference will be FREE to attend, but registration in advance will be required. A Journal Special Issue is a planned outcome.

This conference is organised by colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) together with colleagues in Languages and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies) at The Open University. The conference is supported by OpenARC, The Open University’s Arts Research Centre in the School of Arts and Humanities, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and by the History of Books and Reading (HOBAR), Contemporary Cultures of Writing, Digital Humanities, and Literature and Politics research groups in the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) at the Open University.

Conference Lead Organiser: Sara Haslam

Programme Committee members: Francesca Benatti; Daria Chernysheva; Delia da Sousa Correa; Rachele De Felice; Jonathan Gibson; Ed Hogan; Peg Katritzky; Lania Knight; Philip Seargeant; Jennifer Shepherd; Emma Sweeney; Shafquat Towheed; Nicola Watson; Anne Wetherilt.

Conference website: https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/

Visual 1: Detail from letter, Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Bath, 12 May 1801. Morgan Library and Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia.
Visual 2: Detail from Reginald Marsh “Unloading the Mail”. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Full scale image available at https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.24950. No known copyright restriction.