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Shortlisted for 2017 Pageturner Prize

 My as-yet-unpublished novel, The Everlasting Knock, has been shortlisted for this year’s Pageturner Prize. Coming so soon after my London Magazine news, this is a double thrill. I am really liking 2017 so far.  The winner was announced earlier this week, along with details of the shortlist: ‘Tibor Jones are thrilled to announce the winner of…

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Two Pair of Nightjars

 Spent some of my Christmas break catching up on my reading. I made time to read the wonderfully chilling and complex His Bloody Project (should have won the Booker IMHO), I spent New Year’s Day and the day or two after finally giving Chris Ware’s beautiful Building Stories the time and attention it deserves, and…

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2016 in Books

 Happy New Year everyone. And apologies. It’s been a while since I last posted here. The last few months have been swamped with the day job and cramming in editing of the latest novel in preparation for submission to agents. Hence the blogging had to give. I can report though, that I hit send on the latest novel recently. What does this mean? Well I am loving being able to switch gears and get back into writing some short fiction. I almost immediately stepped back into a short story. I have two characters, thrown together and currently no real idea of where they are about to take me. Getting back…

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The End begins in Norwich

 Spent a wonderful evening at the launch of The End at UEA’s Enterprise centre last night. This was a doubly special launch as it was the first showing of the wonderful Nicolas Ruston paintings that inspired the stories in The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings short fiction collection, as well as being the first…

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Essays galore over on Thresholds

 My Thresholds shortlisted essay examining William Gay’s ‘Where will you go when your skin cannot contain you’ is now live over on the Thresholds, The University of Chichester’s Short Story Forum. In this piece I explore the first short story of Gay’s that I stumbled across in the pages of The Best American Short Stories…

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Being Dad launch @ Norwich Writers Centre

 From the blurb: In Being Dad, fifteen contemporary writers – all fathers themselves – explore the highs and lows of fatherhood. From protective instincts gone awry to the ghosts of our fathers haunting every parenting decision, these short stories shine a light on what it means to be a father in the twenty-first century. Well,…

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Shortlisted (again) for the Thresholds Prize

 For the fourth year running I have managed to make the Thresholds Feature Writing Competition shortlist. The competition which celebrates the short story form is now in its fifth year and the shortlist is always crammed with some great writing that gives a fresh perspective on short stories and writers both well known and more…

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Judging the East Midlands Book Award 2016

 This year I am thrilled to be one of the judges of the East Midlands Book Award, the prestigious literary prize awarded annually to the best book written by an East Midlands author. From the EMBA website: ‘Every year £1000 is awarded to a writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry or plays. This can include work…

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Being Dad

   For those of you wondering what Being Dad is, here’s the blurb from the Tangent Books Being Dad order page: Fatherhood is in a state of flux. Gone are the simplistic gender roles of yesteryear, the clear divisions between mothers and fathers. More dads than ever before are staying home to be full-time parents…

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Goodbye 2015, Hello 2016

 Well, another year done and what a year. 2015 kicked of with the arrival of the results of my MA Creative Writing  and I was thrilled, after three years of work, to receive a Distinction. In April, around the anniversary of its publication, my debut collection of short stories, Looking Out of Broken Windows, was…

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My Top Books of 2015

 Tomorrow I’ll be posting a full cover gallery of the titles I have read in 2015. In the meantime, thought I’d post a few words about my favourite books from this year’s reading. Assembling the gallery post revealed a trend towards prefering slim books (no more than 200 pages or so) to larger tomes, possibly…

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Bath Short Story Award Anthology 2015.

 Twenty stories – the winning, shortlisted and a selection of the longlisted stories from the 2015 Bath Short Story Award – “A hot, tragic summer in 1980s Belfast. The loss of love echoed through the Shipping Forecast. A woman writes ‘love’ letters for illiterate girls in the Far East. The Kilburnie Kings hit the town.…

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