From the Editor
It’s all too rare that the talent and originality of our new crop of short fiction writers is celebrated (apart from in the pages of Litro, that is) – so this month we thought we’d do something about that.
There’s a whiff of East London about this issue too – rather appropriately, as we’re showcasing award-winning authors who we reckon are the next big thing. Louise Stern, whose story Rio opens this issue, lives in Dalston, our author portraits were all shot at the magnificent Dalston Boys’ Club, and two of the pieces (from new authors Sammy Wright and Jackson Martin) are set, respectively, on a Clapton bus and in the hidden, graffitiscrawled byways of Old Street and Shoreditch.
Of course it’s great to see that the short story scene in the UK is undeniably undergoing a renaissance, even a mini-boom, but there’s a long way to go yet before writers of shorter work are accorded the same
respect and rewards as they are in America, where Annie Proulx, Miranda July, Jhumpa Lahiri and Lorrie Moore are names to conjure with.
There are a number of well-established competitions with big jackpots for a single story – but once you’ve cashed the cheque and basked in the glory, where do you go to get your collection published? In a market in which the received wisdom is that books of short stories are, at best, prestigious loss-leaders, it’s several degrees of magnitude harder to launch your debut collection, or even novella, than your debut novel – but we are proud to feature prizewinning authors including Louise Stern, Siân Melangell Dafydd and Clare Wigfall (recently awarded the National Short Story
Prize) who have done just that.
The question sceptics sometimes ask is: Why bother? Who reads short stories, anyway? And the answer we give is: We do.
Katy Darby
Editor
