Authors Electric

The short list for the BBC National Short Story Award has just been announced and it's a shocker!  There are no men on it... ( David Gilmour take note)  At £15,000 this is one of the most valuable prizes in literature, and it emphasises the short story's status as a literary art form.  The high value we place on the short story is a big contrast with its lack of appeal as a commercial publishing prospect.  Fewer and fewer publishers are accepting them and then only as a gesture towards their best-selling authors.  Newspaper and magazine outlets have also dwindled. But, readers like short stories and writers like writing them.  The result is a flourishing Indie-publishing scene for short fiction - not just in book form, but also in E-zines and blogs and Facebook groups.  People are reading Flash fiction on their mobile phones and downloading stories onto their I-pads from sites where you can read any kind of fiction from erotic to murderous, ...

For the first time, a major literary award - the Costa prize for short fiction - has gone to an independently published author, once a member of Authors Electric,   Avril Joy   for a story called Millie and Bird (download and read here)    I first met Avril a few years ago when she asked me to go into a women's prison and talk about Catherine Cookson.  I found it a very sobering experience and had nothing but admiration at the way Avril worked in this environment on a regular basis. Avril is a quiet, unassuming person with a profound knowledge of human nature acquired through years of working in the prison service as an education officer.  Add to that a love of language - Avril is a poet as well as a prose author - and you have a writer with a lot of  skills and considerable empathy.  Avril's first novels were written with the assistance of a 'Northern Promise ' writers' award from the Arts Council.  Her first novel, The Sweet Tr...