The Busy Writer in February: News and Opportunities

No longer dark at 4! Crocuses and snowdrops! Wendy Erskine’s Dance Move! Read about all the exciting things happening in February below!

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The Bath Short Story Awards

The ninth Bath Short Story Award is open for entries now! It will close on Monday, April 11th at midnight BST. They welcome stories of up to 2200 words on any subject or theme from anywhere in the world. This year’s competition is judged by Word Factory director Paul McVeigh.

The Queen Mary Wasafiri Short Story Competition

The 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2022.  Exceptionally international in scope, the prize supports writers who have not yet published a book-length work, with no limits on age, gender, nationality, or background. All fifteen shortlistees and winners will also be offered the Chapter and Verse or Free Reads mentoring scheme in partnership with The Literary Consultancy.  

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Dance Move by Wendy Erskine

Wendy Erskine’s first collection Sweet Home was amazing. This collection is even better! It is out this month and is full of rich, funny and incredibly intimate stories that touch the very quick of our humanity.

Listen to this!

Adam Levin reads ‘A Lot of Things Have Happened’ in The New Yorker

This is an excellent story: a series of ‘things happening’ that, with the rather amazing (horror? meta? punchline?) ending, suddenly inflects the story with a wholly different (and ambiguous) atmosphere.

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London Library Presents Reverse Engineering

To celebrate their first book, REVERSE ENGINEERING, Scratch Books have teamed up with the London Library to host an astonishing collection of writers on March 17th. As Chris Power has said, this is the Avengers Infinity War of short story writers. What’s lovely is this is an “in real life” and “online” event so you can attend from anywhere.

At the time of writing, there were still tickets for the physical event though we hear they are going pretty fast!

Compiled by Tom Conaghan. If there is something you’re doing that Word Factory followers should know about, email him at tom@thewordfactory.tv