9th April 2025
‘He knows his brother is driving. The two of them are in their mother’s car and his brother is next to him. He rests his head against the passenger window and closes his eyes. There are bumps in the road. His head bangs against the window but there is no pain.’
6th March 2025
“The children step forward one by one, and say, ‘I’m special because…’ and one by one they fill in why with brave, loud voices. They’re too young to hide who they are. The people watching them know them better than they’ll ever know themselves.”
7th January 2025
‘From inside this hell, in this dazed state of terror, I write to you about my adventure yesterday, offering a testimony of defeat from a man who longs for a hot bath like the ones he used to take before the war.’
28th December 2024
‘[N]one of us likes to think we live and have our days in a time more stupid than others we might have lived in. All previous ages were the dark ages, we like to believe, and we are the new and enlightened ones.’
8th November 2024
For this month’s story, Nuala O’Connor takes inspiration from Elizabeth Bowen’s 1925 short story, ‘The Parrot’.
Eley Williams and Nell StevensFiction
3rd October 2024
This month’s story is co-authored by Eley Williams and Nell Stevens. It’s from Duets, a new anthology of co-authored stories, published this month by Scratch Books.
11th September 2024
A new story by Lucy Sweeney Byrne from her second collection of stories, Let’s Dance, which will be published next month by Banshee Press.
6th August 2024
'As she flew through the sky in the white clouds, Fatma agonised over the expectations placed on her. She thought about all the cars she was expected to bring back to her village, and the promises she had made to find people jobs – as if she could create opportunities in Bahari!'
4th July 2024
A new short story from Wendy Erskine, written in 48 hours as part of our Great Big Giant Short Story Experiment.
5th June 2024
‘Normally I hate swimming in the ocean, everything about it scares me deeply; but after a few drinks I dive in fearlessly, with abandon and hope.’