£1 tickets for under represented writers on a low income*

How do you craft a short story so it grabs and holds a reader’s attention? We’ll discuss the essential ingredients including: developing your narrator’s voice, perspective, compelling dialogue, avoiding exposition, improving the language we use, editing and re-writing.

Farah Ali – short story writer, novelist and an editor at Wasafiri magazine

Wendy Erskine – award winning short story writer and novelist

Farah Ali is the writer of the novels Telegraphy and The River, The Town, and the short-story collection People Want to Live. Her work has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in Shenandoah, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is the cofounder of Lakeer, and an editor at Wasafiri.

Wendy Erskine’s debut novel The Benefactors is published by Sceptre and her two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move, are published by The Stinging Fly Press and Picador.  She was chosen by the Observer as a Best Debut Novelist of 2025 and has been listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Prize.  She was awarded the Butler Prize for Literature and the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a secondary school teacher in Belfast.

https://cwagency.co.uk/client/wendy-erskine

Run by international creative writing competition The Bridport Prize. Previous winners include Kate Atkinson and Kit de Waal. Discover more at www.bridportprize.org.uk

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Short Story Toolkit