Lots happening the last week or two. Both the Horncastle News and Lincolnshire Echo featured pieces on my upcoming appearance at the first ever London Short Story Festival alongside Adam Marek, Robert Shearman and Tania Hershman. There are still tickets available for the  event so if you like short stories with a dash of the weird and are in London on Saturday morning you could do a lot worse than book yourself a ticket for the event here. There’s loads happening at the Festival over the weekend with lots of free events, it’s well worth checking out the full list.

The Frank O’Connor International Prize longlist was announced on the 9th June and it was both thrilling and sort of weird to see my little book rubbing shoulders with recent collections from the likes of A. L. Kennedy, Lorrie Moore, Per Petterson, David Park and David Rose. No surprise that I didn’t make the shortlist against such stuff competition, but on the up side, the longlist made me aware of Annaliese Mackintosh’s debut collection, Any Other Mouth. I read the opening stories of the collection from the Kindle sample and promptly ordered a print copy for myself as an extra Father’s Day treat. If you like spiky stories that are by turns heartbreaking, shocking and darkly humourous then this is a collection you should not miss.

Finally, I heard this evening that my latest short story, has made the final twenty stories of the BBC Opening Lines call for submissions. This is incredibly exciting and the final selection will be announced very soon so I am simultaneously keeping fingers crossed and trying not too think to much about it. Whatever happens though, there’ll be new, quality short fiction on the radio which is always a good thing.