I certainly grinned when I was told yesterday that I’d won the UK Fiction Factory’s 2019-2020 short story prize for my yarn Last Meal. At 150 quid, the first-prize money sure ain’t Nobel-sized, but I was thrilled to come out on top in an international competition. Read my story and learn more about the Fiction Factory competition at http://www.fiction-factory.biz/.
Commenting on the effects of COVID-19 on the housing market, a real-estate executive said yesterday that she thought there’d be ‘less transactions in the sales area’. I collapsed, of course. The word ‘less’ is wrong for a start. And ‘in the sales area’ is just inflated rubbish speech. What she should have said was that there’d be ‘fewer sales’. That’s all. No more, no less. Pedant! I hear you scream. Yes, but there’s more to it than that. My best …
THE FOLLOWING article of mine was published in the ‘review’ section of The Weekend Australian in June 2018. Twenty years ago this month (June 1998) The Harvill Press in London published an English translation of a German novel that shredded the conventions of creative writing. Among many scholars and critics, its English explosion was something like a literary Big Bang. W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn lacked plot and character development. Its narrator meandered physically and intellectually, retelling unconnected …