The boys call her Wardy, like she’s one of the lads, a bit of a laugh. Maybe she’s leading a double life; they all fancy her anyway. They just ignore me, most of the time. Same goes for the teachers. Jane Ward’s intelligent and independent. I’m invisible. I do everything with my best mate, Carmen. We walk to school and tennis club and Guides and that keeps us on the […]
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Did you ever have a day when you were just sick of your own face? It comes out of the blue: you see some random stranger and the face they wear is so perfect in proportion, complexion, structure, that you realise your face is a clunky mess in comparison: a Picasso to their Rossetti. And for half an hour, half a day, half a moment, you wish you had someone […]
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, (well, Yorkshire) there was a short fiction festival. Legend has it that this festival took place in Leeds once a year on a weekend in early June, in a theatre known as The Carriageworks. It was the Northern Short Story Festival and people came from far and wide to experience its many delights. Upon hearing about this momentous event, one […]
Tickets for this year’s Festival are selling fast, and some workshops have already sold out. Have you got yours yet? Visit our Festival page on the Carriageworks Box Office website to book. Saturday Day Tickets are £30, for which you get 2x workshops, and 2x reading events. To book one of these, go to Carriageworks Box Office, add a morning workshop, We Were Strangers, an afternoon workshop, and Resist! Stories […]
This year, we are incredibly proud to be bringing back our Flash Fiction Slam for the third year in a row. Take our challenge, and maybe you could end up in our Flash Fiction Hall of fame! This year, our slam judges are the legendary Tania Hershman, and brilliant Flash Fiction writer & performer Benjamin Judge. The rules are simple. Each contender has 5 minutes to read a complete story. […]
We are thrilled to announce this year’s Northern Short Story Festival programme. Taking place on Friday 31st May – Sunday 2nd June, the fourth Northern Short Story Festival takes place at Carriageworks Theatre. It has workshops, performances, social events, a Flash Fiction slam and a FREE “Blankety Blank” themed afterparty. There really is something for everyone! Tickets start at £4 / Free, with a Saturday day ticket (which gets […]
Are you an artist, film maker, developer, musician, or craft maker? Whether you knit or edit, our Creatives Mixer on June 2nd is for you. Hosted by the Northern Short Story Festival, the only festival in the North dedicated to short stories and short story writers, the Creatives Mixer aims to bring artists, makers and creatives of all types together to meet one another for potential collaborations and working relationships. […]
MEMOIR – or creative non-fiction – is enjoying a gathering popularity among contemporary readers. Why should that be? Because everyone loves a personal story, powerfully told. Despite the old-fashioned tinge of the word itself – ‘memoir’ – this form offers great imaginative possibilities to writers. Less constraining than straightforward autobiography, yet holding within it the power of a real-life experience, memoir can draw us into the world of another, in […]
“CHILD COMPANION WANTED age 6-7, for boy 7 Capt. Hall, M.F.H., St Breward, Bodmin” The brief notice in a 1938 edition of The Times newspaper was squeezed between adverts for a Cornish hotel and ‘Miss Oliver’s High Colonic Irrigation’. I don’t know to this day how I spotted it. I wasn’t even supposed to be reading the personal columns. I was doing research for my job as a TV […]
I’ve ringed the dates on my calendar with a fancy purple marker pen (not that I could forget!). The leaves are already bristling with the promise of exciting events at the forthcoming NoShoSto Festival. Here are just three which I’m particularly looking forward to. On Saturday 1st June, 2pm, the award winning short story writer C G Menon will be running a workshop called ‘Credible and Compelling Writing’. Through […]