So I find it really scintillating to track the different styles and different ambitions in writing. And you know the problem with urgency is: how do you control it? And so what I’m looking for in a lot of ways is: how is this being controlled and shaped? I think there there are some things that we can control and some things that we can’t control, but one thing that we can control is the craft. They’re conveying something, and I think conveying something with urgency. The voices aren’t coming from a limited cultural perspective, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just there’s a breadth of wider experiences by the writers. I like this prize especially because it’s so international.

Yes, in ways I feel like the short story is more immediately discoverable, like it’s more surprising in a lot of ways because things can shift in a sentence.Īnd did anything from judging the past few years stick with you? In one of our previous interviews, Isha Karki, one of our 2021 runners-up, commented that she felt like short fiction lent an opportunity for stylistic experimentation. In a lot of ways I feel like the writing matters way more in a short story, so my attention is more focused on the word by word, sentence by sentence, rather than zooming out and looking at it structurally or page by page. My primary form is really the novel and screenplays, so I’ve been looking at the longer telling. I know before I start whether it’s a novel or a short story. Is there a quality of difference between the practice of writing short fiction and long form fiction for you? I really love short stories, so yes, basically. I haven’t been writing short stories since my collection came out, which was in 2017. Yeah it does actually, I hadn’t really thought about that. I was going to ask if that reconnects you to short fiction.

I don’t teach, I’m never reading student work, so this is kind of the only time that I see brand new work from writers who haven’t published books or haven’t been in a major journal. What do I get out of it? I get to see what people are putting out. Yeah, I remember entering contests and having no idea who was on the other end judging me. You must get something from the experience of judging… You’ve now judged the BOMB prize and the Creation prize and I was wondering how that’s been. So, I wanted to start off by asking about literary prize judging.

It’s been four years we’ve been working together.

The Quintuple Whammy (DIGITAL ED.): Eleven Stories 2018 – 2022.

Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2023 – 2023 PRIZE NOW CLOSED.

The End of the World: Desperate Literature’s Guide to Dystopia.

The 2019 Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology.

Juana y La Cibernética (edición bilingüe).

‘The Quintuple Whammy: Eleven Stories 2018 – 2022’ (the.

Moshfegh short stories