The Short Story with Nicholas Royle and Lara Williams

Join the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Nicholas Royle and Lara Williams as they discuss the fine art of the short story and their latest work in the genre. The event, organised by the Manchester Writing School, will also give you the chance to question the two guests about what they think makes the short story form so dynamic and so unique.

On the short story front, Nicholas Royle has written 150 short stories and edited over 20 short story anthologies, including numerous volumes of the annual Best British Short Stories from Salt Publishing.

Nicholas Royle is Reader in Creative Writing at Man Met’s Manchester Writing School (home, no less, to the country’s largest postgraduate English and Creative Writing community), and he has written two novellas and seven novels, most recently Manchester-set First Novel (Vintage). On the short story front, Nicholas Royle has written 150 short stories and edited over 20 short story anthologies, including numerous volumes of the annual Best British Short Stories from Salt Publishing. He is the head judge of the short story award Manchester Fiction Prize and he has won awards himself, from the British Fantasy Award to the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize for his short story collection, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail). He runs Nightjar Press, which specialises in uncanny/gothic short stories published in chapbook format, and his latest collection of short stories, London Gothic, has just come out with Manchester’s Confingo Publishing and is available from Greenhouse Books, among other good independent bookshops. London Gothic is the first in a projected series of city-based short story collections, with forthcoming volumes devoted to Paris and Manchester.

Lara Williams teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her debut collection of stories, Treats (in the US, A Selfie as Big as the Ritz), was published in 2017 and her much anticipated debut novel, Supper Club, was published last year. Another fan of the uncanny, she has a story in the Comma Press anthology The New Abject, which just came out in time for Halloween, and she features in Best British Short Stories 2017. Her writing has been in The Guardian, The Independent, Vice, Times Literary Supplement and McSweeney’s, among other places, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.