Dan Powell

August 16, 2020

‘Exterior. Train Station Platform. Night’ highly commended in Bath Short Story Award 2020

I was thrilled to hear yesterday that another story produced as part my PhD research, ‘Exterior. Train Station Platform. Night’, was highly commended in the Bath Short Story Award. You can also read all about the other prize-winning stories via that link. Massive congrats to Marissa Hoffmann, Sharon Telfer and Samanthi Munasing, who were awarded…

August 5, 2020

Ten favourite sentences (in no particular order)

A long time ago now, editors at the American Scholar selected the Ten Best Sentences in literature. Their list included prose from James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and others. They even included a bonus sentence from Truman Capote. The folks over at Book Riot also joined the party. Reading these lists back…

July 21, 2020

foregroundmusic: Hotel Neon

Been doing a lot of editing of what appears to be coalescing into a collection of weird/eerie/uncanny short stories* which appear to be whacking about in woods haunted by the themes of death, doubles, time and after-lives. As ever, my writing and editing has been sound tracked by a variety of ambient and dronecore pieces,…

July 8, 2020

Edge Hill Prize announces all female longlist

The Edge Hill University Short Story Prize is the only UK based award to recognise excellence in a single authored short story collection. As such it is a tremendously important feature of the writing landscape for anyone who enjoys reading short fiction, as well as anyone engaged in writing short fiction. As someone who sits…

July 4, 2020

Don’t panic – reality is just a redraft

Spent a chunk of this morning wrangling with the themes that define the work of Philip K. Dick. My entry point today was the remarkable lecture he delivered in September 1977 at the 4eme Festival de la Science Fiction in Metz, France: ‘If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.’…

June 25, 2020

Explaining my shelf

I stumbled across Explain Your Shelf recently. It’s a neat little blog with a simple premise: authors take photos of their bookshelves and write something about their contents. Some great posts up there from great writers, including Nuala O’Connor (back when she was publishing as Nuala Ní Chonchúir) and Alex Cox. Unfortunately, it seems that…

June 19, 2020

We’ll see how it goes.

Posting this has highlighted to me just how long it has been since I posted anything on this blog. Over the last year, I have been nestled deep within my PhD research and, when able to come up for breath, I’ve neglected this blog. More recently, you can add the demands of lockdown to the…

June 19, 2020

‘Dissolution’ awarded first prize in the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize

I am thrilled to be able to share the news that my short story’ Dissolution’ has been awarded first prize in the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize. As a doctoral student at University of Leicester*, the city of Leicester has been my adopted home for the last three years and it is wonderful to find…

December 31, 2019

2019 in Books

This year I have mostly been reading:

July 18, 2019

Walter Benjamin’s Rules for Writing

I’m a bit of a sucker for writing rules, even though I know that there really are no rules. I suppose what I really like is what they tell me about another writer’s process. This list of thirteen rules from the desk of Walter Benjamin is new to me. Particularly the awareness of a need…

June 14, 2019

grey is the colour

I knew there was a reason my favourite colour is grey, beyond the level of intuitive preference. Apparently, according to this paint company, grey is the colour of cyberspace. What’s more, they have a whole range of networked greys. So yeah, cyberspace, grey is the colour. (via Bruce Sterling)

May 28, 2019

new_novel.doc (OST)

Put the finishing touches to the latest edit of my novel this morning. Just hit send to my agent and hoping that the changes hit the spot and this baby can start making its way out into the world. For those of you wondering what the novel is all about, here’s a Spotify playlist of…

May 13, 2019

foregroundmusic: New Space Music

Discovered (via the magnificent Warren Ellis) that there was an edition of Brian Eno’s Neroli with an extra track called New Space Music. Neroli has long been a go to piece of writing music for me, so the fact that someone has slapped it on YouTube has made my morning. What this means is, today…

May 11, 2019

foregroundmusic: every right to be Angry

The one silver lining of nearly a decade of bollarding austerity? The only positive that seems to be emerging from the cluster frustration that is Brexit? Britain seems to have a barrage of bands emerging that are angry because they have every right to be. These have been seeing heavy rotation in my ears: Squid…

May 10, 2019

‘a tissue of significances’

More thoughts on something read in pursuit of my PhD thesis. (The verb ‘pursuit’ seems apt and amusing here, like I am chasing this thing down, the thing itself always within sight but out of reach). This, from ‘Understanding Fiction’, made my insides chime and resonate: ‘…a piece of fiction is a tissue of significances,…

April 26, 2019

it’s no use worrying about Time

Both in the novel edits I am neck deep in and in the short stories I have been both studying and writing myself, I have been worrying a lot about time lately. Which probably explains some of why I love this particular reading of Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘Animals’ right now: Zadie Smith recorded on voice…

April 19, 2019

Helvetica for the 21st century

As a bit of a typeface geek, the release of a new Helvetica for today’s devices is something I had to note here. From the press release: ‘Every letter, number, punctuation mark and symbol in the family—nearly 40,000 in all—has been redrawn, analyzed and tested for improved legibility and performance. The result is a better…

April 14, 2019

Black hole, son!*

This week saw the first image of a black hole being shared with the world. Image: BBC NEWS Tickles me that, as this image was powering across the the news and social media, I was busy listening to William Basinski’s On Time Out of Time, ‘50 minutes of drone atmospherics that uses exclusive source recordings…

April 13, 2019

When It’s Human Instead of When It’s Dog

Amy Hempel’s work holds a special place in my personal canon of short story authors. I first discovered her stories when beginning to write my own. This was back in 2009 and I was grabbing up every recommendation of quality short stories that I could. I forget how I first heard of Amy Hempel, but…

April 11, 2019

foregroundmusic: Thom Brennan – Mist

This has been fuelling my writing sessions lately. Haunting and transporting. Just one of many from Thom Brennan; much of his discog is worth a look if ambient for reading/writing is your thing.