DAVID FRANKEL has a look at the stories included in the 2016 BBC National Short Story Award Anthology: ‘each presents us with a character with a crystal clear voice that carries us briefly but completely into their world…’
KJ ORR, winner of the 2016 BBC National Short Story Award, speaks to us about her love of the short story form: ‘Short stories ask the reader to pay attention: I love that. Put another way, they value the reader, the reader’s imagination, engagement and attention. I find this both moving and important – profoundly connective…’
VICTORIA HEATH revels in the human truths of KJ Orr’s LIGHT BOX collection: ‘‘Disappearances’ has one such every day premise: a retired, yet highly regarded, plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires finds solace in a local café. But behind that unassuming front is an entrancing narrative that makes a connection with the reader on a very human level from the start…’
K J ORR on poetry and the short story form: ‘As a short story writer my relationship with poetry is marked most of all by a lack of self-consciousness: by lightness, flexibility, pure pleasure. Friends recommend poems, or poets, and I magpie favoured fragments, which are charged too with my own memories of time and place and connection…’
DAVID FRANKEL reflects on Beta Life from Comma Press, an anthology of short fiction and essays: ‘…what makes these stories particularly interesting is how they explore what it is that makes us human, the things at the core of how we react to the world…’
In the latest instalment of our Short Story Masterclass series, K. J. Orr talks with DAVID CONSTANTINE about competing narratives, literal metaphors, realisations for a writer and much more…
