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Latest news and articles from the Northern Short Story Festival!

Academicians showcasing their work in 2019

Applications for The Northern Short Story Festival Academy 2020 are now open!

The Northern Short Story Festival Academy is delighted to announce that applications to its Academy are now open! Over the last 2 years, the Academy has supported and developed 12 short story writers living in Yorkshire and is now on the search for its next intake. Are you a short story writer who wants to take your writing to the next level? Then the Academy could be for you! The […]

SJ Bradley steps down as director of the Northern Short Story Festival

Dear Friends of the Northern Short Story Festival, After five years at the helm, I’ve recently made the decision to step down as director and programmer of the Northern Short Story Festival. In 2015, I saw the need for the North to have a festival celebrating this precise form. Our region was and is full of excellent shortform writers, and the excellent presses who publish them. My aim was always […]

Making Short Stories Pay with Dan Micklethwaite

In part one of ‘Making Short Stories Pay’, we asked Bluemoose Books Dan Micklethwaite, who writes short stories in a shed in West Yorkshire, and who has published over 50 pieces of published short fiction, including in international pro-paying markets, how an author might make a living from their craft. Part of the Northern Short Story’s online festival this year, part 2 of Making Short Stories Pay takes place on […]

Northern Short Story Festival celebrates its fifth birthday by heading online

This year, the Northern Short Story Festival celebrates its fifth birthday, and we want you to join us! For the first time ever, no matter where you are in the world, you will be able to come to the festival. That’s because this year, our Summer festival will take place online. So if you have a device and an internet connection, you’ll be able to access our programme of workshops, […]

#LeedsSaysThanks

  We are proud to be part of #LeedsSaysThanks: arts organisations saying thank you to those key workers who have risked their lives and given their best during this current pandemic to keep us all safe. As a voluntary run organisation, we at the Northern Short Story Festival know how much a person gives by going above and beyond. That’s why we’re offering any keyworker – whether they’re an NHS […]

Jenn Ashworth & Andrew Michael Hurley: This Dreaming Isle, Sat March 7th 5.00

This Spring, The Northern Short Story Festival is proud to host two of Britain’s most unnerving short story writers, Jenn Ashworth and Andrew Michael Hurley, in Leeds’ most haunted surviving subscription library. Britain has a long history of folk tales, ghost stories and other uncanny fictions, and these literary ley lines are still shimmering beneath the surface of this green and pleasant land. Every few generations this strangeness crawls out […]

First Page Competition: Part of Leeds Lit Fest, Wed March 4th, 6.00

“Grab ‘em with your first sentence!” If your short story or novel demands to be heard, our First Page Competition could be the place for you. Your first page is crucial if you want to grab the attention of a time-strapped editor or agent. Whether you write horror, sci-fi, or literary fiction, make your opening snag our judges’ attention, and you could be our first ever First Page winner. Entrants […]

NoShoSto supports: Leeds Lit Fest 2020 Launch Party With Peepal Tree Press

Our friends at Leeds Lit Fest launch their 2020 programme on Wednesday February 5th, and they can’t wait to tell you all about it. Come along to the glorious Leeds Minster, find out what the Festival is all about and enjoy readings from some of Leeds’ very own Peepal Tree Press authors including Khadijah Ibrahiim, Monique Roffey, Seni Seneviratne, Jacob Ross, Roger Robinson and Malika Booker. The event will be […]

Into Reality: new creative non-fiction by an NHS nurse

We accepted the patient at five in the morning. He was blue-lighted thirty miles up the motorway from the hospital in his home town. It was a chest infection that had caused him to be admitted to a hospital ward, one like hospital wards everywhere: too busy, understaffed, caring in a haphazard institutional way. Easy for an elderly man, not wanting to bother people, to stand and trip and fall […]

Park Life: Richard Smyth on being writer in residence at Middleton Park

It’s a complicated place, this. I like complicated places – and the fortunate thing is, it turns out that all places are complicated, if you look at them closely enough. Looking closely was what I was here to do: to look closely, and to share what I saw. More than once I had to explain that I wasn’t literally the ‘writer in residence’ here in the park. I mean, you […]