Sophie Mackintosh is the author of novels The Water Cure (Hamish Hamilton, 2018), Blue Ticket (Hamish Hamilton, 2020) and Cursed Bread (Penguin, 2023). The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Dazed, Guardian, and The Stinging Fly, amongst others. In 2020 she was picked as ‘a face set to define the decade ahead’ by Vogue UK, alongside writers Jia Tolentino and Oyinkan Braithwaite. She has been writer-in-Residence at the Paris Writer’s Residency, Prague City of Literature, and Gladstone’s Library. www.sophiemackintosh.co.uk
Writing Short Fiction
Mon 21 August 2023 - Fri 25 August 2023
Tutors
/ Sophie Mackintosh & Rachel Trezise
Guest Reader
/ Cynan Jones
Course Fee
/
From
£ per person
Genres
/ FictionShort Stories
Language
/ English
*THIS COURSE IS FULLY BOOKED, CONTACT US IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE PLACED ON OUR WAITING LIST*
Short stories offer writers huge creative freedoms but also require discipline and precision. Less can mean more. This course will explore the fundamentals of great story writing including: finding ideas, plotting, narrative structure, creating three-dimensional characters, editing and completing your manuscript.
With prompts and exercises, you’ll be encouraged to think outside the box and push your fiction to new levels. Reading and discussion as a class will introduce you to an exciting range of stories, and the different ways they are told. The tutors will also help you to find the most powerful way of expressing your material and to experiment with the art of omission. By the end of the week, you’ll be writing stories that hook your readers from the opening line.
The week will be composed of morning workshops, both practical and creative, and one-to-one sessions with the tutors in the afternoons, as well as plenty of free time for your own writing. By the end of the week, you can expect to have a more thorough understanding of the short story form, new ideas, and hopefully a new story or two.
Tutors
Sophie Mackintosh
Rachel Trezise
Rachel Trezise is a novelist, short story writer and playwright from the Rhondda Valley. Her debut novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl (Parthian, 2000) won a place on the Orange Futures List in 2002. In 2006 her first short fiction collection Fresh Apples (Parthian, 2005) won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second short fiction collection Cosmic Latte (Parthian, 2013) won the Edge Hill Prize Readers Award in 2014. Her most recent play Cotton Fingers toured Ireland and Wales and won the Summerhall Lustrum Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. Her most recent work is a novel, Easy Meat (Parthian, 2021).
Guest Reader
Cynan Jones
Cynan Jones is an acclaimed fiction writer from the west coast of Wales. His work has appeared in over twenty countries, and in journals and magazines including Granta and The New Yorker. He has also written a screenplay for the hit crime drama Hinterland, a collection of tales for children, and a number of stories for BBC Radio. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous awards, and won, among other prizes, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award, and the BBC National Short Story Award. www.cynanjones.com