Emily Paull

This coming Monday (March 4th) will see the announcement of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist, and around the internet, I have seen quite a few videos and blog posts in which people are attempting to guess what will be on there! Usually there are 16 books on the longlist, and past winners of the prize have included Madeline Miller, Ali Smith, Kamila Shamsie, Barbara Kingsolver, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rose Tremain, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and loads of other amazing women writers.  The prize has had many iterations in terms of its name, with the naming rights having previously gone to the major sponsor (The Orange Prize, The Baileys Prize), but is now called The Women's Prize. It recognises a novel written originally in English by a writer identifying as female, and must have been published in the UK between April last year and March this year. (I think!) If you'd like to know more about the prize or see a full list of past winners, their website is linked h...

In my last post, I talked about where some of the ideas for the stories in my collection came from. It's never an easy thing to pin down. Even after finishing the post, I kept thinking about things I could add. A lot of my stories are autobiographical but only up to a point. Some of them have links to things that really happened. Some are completely made up. In fact, I think it's more accurate to say that a lot of my stories start off  as autobiographical.  So how do I take the germ of an idea and turn it into a story? My relationship to the process of writing a short story hasn't really changed much over the ten years since I started Writing Short Stories for real. Once I get an idea that really interests me, I need to get to the keyboard or my journal and get it all down, preferably in one hit. Sometimes the idea itself might have been obsessing me for a time, but if the spark of the idea is not enough to sustain a writing session all the way through to the e...