As it's National Short Story Day, I've been thinking about the moment I fell in love with the short story. And there was a specific moment. It happened when I was 17. I was watching MTV, and saw one of the spots in their 'Books: feed your head' campaign. The spot featured Aidan Quinn reading the opening lines of Kafka's Metamorphosis. I fell in … [Read more...]
Archives for 2011
Look what the postie brought me all the way from Toronto…
...the advance reading copy of the North American edition of Instruction Manual For Swallowing. I'm loving the little robot wasp on the cover. It comes out from ECW Press next April, and will be part of their BackLit series, which features bonus material - in this edition of IMFS there will be two new short stories and an interview (with me, I … [Read more...]
Kikinda Short Story Festival, Serbia
I just spent the most amazing week of literary hedonism in Serbia, at the Kikinda Short Story Festival. Along with 23 writers from 18 countries, I ate testicles, showered in sulphurous water, did a live interview on Serbian radio at 8am after 3 hours' sleep while hungover, then got to feel like royalty on a horse-and-carriage tour of … [Read more...]
Thank you Arts Foundation!
For years I've been getting up at 6am every day to write for an hour or so before heading out to work. I've always longed to have proper time to write, and now, finally, I have it. It's all thanks to the Arts Foundation. At the end of January, they awarded me the Arts Foundation Fellowship in short story writing. At the awards … [Read more...]