Last Call – Inspirations and Prize Fund

Here is how some of our previous winners and finalists got on before and after appearing in New Short Stories. In no particular order:

Nick Holdstock @NickHoldstock since winning with “Ward” in 2014 has published The Casualties, a novel from St Martins Press.

Henrietta Rose-Innes @HenriettaRI won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her story Falling appeared in New Short Stories 4.

Willie Davis’s story Kid in a Well from New Short Stories was also published online in The Guardian modern fiction. Link

In the same year she won first prize in our competition,  Wena Poon went on to have her novel Alex y Robert serialised in ten parts on BBC Radio 4’s “A Book at Bedtime”.

Valerie Trueblood, shortlisted in our first year, went on to be shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor award for “Marry or Burn”.

Jo Lloyd (@jolloyds) who won first prize for her story Work, later in the same year won the Asham Award with another story.

Mikey Delgado’s winning story Secure was also published online in The Guardian original writing. Link

Previous winner Virginia Gilbert @GinnyGilbert went on to write and direct the feature film “A Long Way Home” with James Fox & Natalie Dormer as well as publishing a novel, among many other things (like so many of the writers listed here).

Vanessa Gebbie’s (@VanessaGebbie) later novel The Coward’s Tale was published by Bloomsbury in the UK & USA.

Danielle McLaughlin @DanniLmc went on to publish Dinosaurs on Other Planets, the title story from which appeared in The New Yorker.

More recent books of note by New Short Stories contributors:
Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor @NualaNiC (Sandstone Press)
Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé  http://www.morowayejide.com (Atria Books)
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris @tolmorris (Faber & Faber)

We could go on and on, and in fact we do that over on Twitter, so please follow @storyofthemonth for more literary inspiration and a few more quirky odds and ends.

Prizes 2016

• 1st prize is a one-off Willesden Herald mug inscribed “The Willesden Short Story Prize 2016” and a bottle of champagne courtesy of Liars’ League.
• Additionally either (a) half of all net entry fees OR (b) all net entry fees after the first 150 entries, whichever is the greater, will be divided equally among the ten short-listed.
• All ten short-listed stories will be published in “Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9”.
• Two complimentary copies of the anthology to each of the ten authors.
• A results/book launch event with Liars’ League actors reading from the short-listed stories.
• Literary agent Carrie Kania of Conville & Walsh agency has kindly agreed to read the ten winning stories.

Liars’ League is an award-winning, globe-spanning live fiction event in its tenth year, so why not get in on the short story action? The next event, with a Gods & Mortals theme, is on Tuesday 13th September from 7.30pm at The Phoenix, 37 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0PP, and entry is just £5 on the door. The next submission deadline, for October’s Flesh & Bone Hallowe’en night, is Sunday 4th September: send your spine-chilling stories of 800-2000 words to liars@liarsleague.com and see www.liarsleague.com for full submission guidelines.

OUR JUDGE FOR 2016

Katy Darby’s short fiction has won various prizes, been read on BBC Radio 4, and appeared in magazines and anthologies including Stand, Mslexia, Slice, The London Magazine and the Arvon/Daily Telegraph Anthology. She has a BA in English Literature from Oxford University and an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, where she won the David Higham Award. Her first novel, The Unpierced Heart, is published by Penguin (Fig Tree). She is a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at City University, is Literary Editor of .Cent and a former editor of Litro magazine, and co-founded and directs the award-winning short story event Liars’ League (www.liarsleague.com).