What happened? And what happened next? These two questions, according to writer Tessa Hadley in a recent article, drive all of her short stories. I found them helpful as a way of thinking about this tricky form, and with lots of short story competitions coming up, including The Big Issue’s annual Fiction Edition, I’ve created a […]

It’s on again—the Australian Short Story Festival! As the name suggests, it is a festival dedicated to the short story in written and spoken forms. It brings together local, national and international short story authors and oral storytellers in a culturally diverse and vibrant celebration. We’ve published a lot of short story collections over the years, and have […]

The year I turned seventeen I fell in love with a cynical older man who was unaware of my existence; causing devastation in a heart that would never heal. I used this unusual experience and wrote a story about it. It was imaginatively titled ‘A Matter of Destiny,’ and published by an Indian women’s magazine […]

English novelist Thomas Hardy was an unlikely role model for a book-obsessed young girl growing up in India, but I credit Hardy, and the Romantic poets, with my initiation into writing. Something about Hardy’s grimness appealed enormously. I named the hero in my own novel after Hardy’s Gabriel, that laconic and patient farmer who knows, […]

A lot of writers talk about failure—about checking the longlist of literary awards and competitions only to be disheartened. They also talk about learning from this, and persevering despite this. As the judge of the Margaret River Press Short Story Competition, can you tell us about how subjectivity factors into this and what this may […]

What draws you to write short stories, and who has influenced your writing practice of this form? I had never written a short story until I started studying creative writing at university. Writers that influenced me included Tim O’Brien, Janet Frame, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alice Munro. O’Brien’s story, ‘The Things They Carried’ (1990), was […]

The prize is getting into the chair every day. The prize is saying to myself, this isn’t over. Because my story isn’t finished. I regard submission of a story as an achievement. It signifies that I’ve written a story, which puts me a long way in front of the earlier me, the person who dreamed […]

The following is the title story from Fabulous Lives—our upcoming anthology by Perth writer Bindy Pritchard. Her collection features stories that embrace people with all their frailties and strengths, failures and hopes, as they reach critical junctures in their lives.   ‘Fabulous Lives’ It was too late for Edith. She knew that when she stood in the […]

In some writing workshops, there’s an inverse ratio between how closely someone has read a story and how much they’ve got to say about it. I’m a diligent reader. I pay attention to the stories people have submitted; some might say too much attention. My friends judge me as intense. The judgement of others tends […]

I don’t know many writers. In the town where I was born no-one ever admitted they were a writer. Contemplation was an illness, and its practitioners were people to be avoided. Perhaps nobody wrote. Or perhaps the irrigation plains of northern Victoria were so plain that people thought they couldn’t write about them. I decided […]