Northern Short Story Festival

14 posts

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 […]

Virtual Pub Quiz with Joe Williams

PWYF / Suggested donation £3 Get a round in at the “bar” and join Saboteur shortlisted writer, poet, and Viz writer Joe Williams for our first ever Virtual Pub Quiz. Just like any other pub quiz, you’ll work in teams, and try to answer questions in the literary-flavoured Picture Round, Music Round, and Missing Word Round. With prizes in several different categories, and the cheapest pints in Leeds (depending on […]

Writer Alison Littlewood tells us about her favourite horror

This October, we’re proud to be hosting acclaimed horror writer Alison Littlewood, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction. Her latest novel, Mistletoe, a winter ghost story, is published in October this year, and previous books have been selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, and described as ‘perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.’ Her short stories have been picked for several year’s best anthologies, and […]

Sick Face, by Lynn Bauman-Milner

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 […]

Northern Short Story Festival 2019 in review by Andrew Tymms

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 […]

Northern Short Story Festival Tickets – Book Here!

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 […]

Northern Short Story Festival 2019 Programme Announced

  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 […]

The Power of the Personal by workshop leader Barney Bardsley

  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 […]

Workshop leader Sarah Dunnakey on writing Yorkshire-set historical mystery The Companion

  “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 […]