'Turning': the short story competition anthology

The Liverpool Literary Festival Short Story Competition is back, and this year's theme, "Turning," inspired many wonderful entries. We're thrilled to announce the winning stories, but first, here’s an introduction from Dr. Danny O'Connor. Dr. Danny O’Connor, a Colm Toíbín Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool, was one of the judges for the competition.

Introduction from Dr Danny O’Connor

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way,” writes Flannery O’Connor, “and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.” No wonder it’s a notoriously tricky form to master; how do you invent a world in a rush and then, just as hastily, leave it resounding beyond itself? Yet there’s something about the democratic possibility of it that makes it so appealing for a writing competition. The short story doesn’t need the novel’s years or even its room of one’s own – an afternoon on a park bench or in a café might just about do it, a few bus journeys tapping away on your phone, a quiet stretch in a classroom. Novels have a tendency to sit on the coast of your life like a tanker, waiting for a good place to dock. Short stories, though, are tantalisingly close, and tangibly attainable. It turns out they’re right in front of us, and everywhere. Your house is full of them, as is the street, the supermarket, the train to work. As Raymond Carver observes, “It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about common-place things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power.” This is partly why the short story feels attainable: you only have to reach out and touch, say, a tree – as Oliver Yu’s ‘The Turning of Time’ does – and it’s there in your hand. That nearness draws writers out of people who weren’t sure if they were writers and confirms the talent of people who were already convinced.  

The entries in this year’s competition all centre on the theme of ‘Turning’. The variety is suitably dizzying, from the carefully wrought emotional circuits of Michael Holloway’s pottery wheel through Eleanor McAdam’s formally adventurous AI dilemma to the inventive and moving upended grief of Caitlin Mercer’s ‘Orange Juice on the Ceiling’. The way each of these stories twists around its centre makes us see things anew, whether it’s the haunting terror of Remy Pemberton’s tale of young Maddie in ‘Turning the Tide’ or the reflective qualities of Laura Brough’s narrator in ‘The Lady’s Not for Turning’, digging through her life. Ava Williams’ story sits with the strain of an uncomfortable moment of private change being played out in public. In ‘I turned my face away, and dreamed about you’, Holly Dempster-Edwards distracts us with the festive busyness of a December day while the narrator’s life turns slowly underneath, finishing with a memory of more jubilant rotations. Marvellous Oladigbo’s ‘Nightmarish Rotations’ turns reality in dreams and vice-versa, while Alp Cam’s ‘Behind’ keeps us turning to look over our shoulders.  

“When you read a short story,” says George Saunders, “you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” These are stories written at various stages in life, from Year 7 school pupils through to University of Liverpool staff members; each of them promises to make us a little more aware from different viewpoints, and a little more in love with the world on which we’re turning, too.  

Writing competition categories

Staff and students

• Staff
• Postgraduate
• Undergraduate.

School pupils

• Years 7-8  
• Years 9-10

You can download the full anthology here.