I’m doing another event at Salisbury Literary Festival (the other is a class here). I hope some you can come along.

Short Story Evening: Irenosen Okojie, Susmita Bhattacharya & Paul McVeigh

OCTOBER 19, 2019 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM 

CULTURE COFFEE, 69 FISHERTON STREET, SALISBURY SP2 7SU

“Rounding off a packed day of events, join us at Culture Coffee and settle back with a glass of wine (included in the ticket price) for an evening of fabulous short stories in the company of the award-winning authors, Irenosen Okojie, Susmita Bhattacharya and Paul McVeigh

Irenosen Okojie’s debut novel, Butterfly Fish, won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Edinburgh First Book Award. Her first short story collection, Speak Gigantular was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Irenosen was recently made a fellow of The Royal Society Of Literature as part of their 40 Under 40 initiative. Her latest short story collection, Nudibranch is published in November by Dialogue Books.

Susmita Bhattacharya is an author and a creative writing tutor at Winchester University. Her short stories have been internationally published, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Susmita’s collection of short stories, Table Manners, was published in 2018 by Dahlia Publishing and was the winner of the best short story collection at this year’s Saboteur Awards.

Paul McVeigh’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award. He is co-founder of London Short Story Festival and has judged national and international literary prizes. Paul’s short stories have appeared in Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers and Being Various: New Irish Short Stories.”

It’s a wonderful surprise when you’re looking online for something and you come along a review of your work, even a brief mention. Below is a review of my short story on the RTE website. If you follow that link you can read a review of the other stories in the anthology too.

“Paul McVeigh’s The Swimmers skirts in a sly, punctilious way around the subject of molestation without ever making it explicit. An eager-to-please dad elects, with perhaps too much enthusiasm, to drive young teenage lads to a swimming baths on a regular basis as his own son tries to come to terms with his fear of water.”

Buy Here

As a previous winner of The Polari First Novel Prize I was asked to judge the inaugural Polari Prize, founded by the amazing Paul Burston.

The shortlist has been announced in The Bookseller.

-1970s tale Take Nothing With You by Patrick Gale (Tinder); novel Prodigal by Charles Lambert (Gallic); gay drama A Simple Scale by David Llewellyn (Seren); childhood-set Playtime by Andrew McMillan (Cape Poetry) and Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (Granta), which tells the story of a teenage Silvie living in a hut in Northumberland, will go head to head with Bradbury for the Polari Prize.

Commenting on the Polari Prize, author and judge Paul McVeigh said: “What a rich and diverse body of LGBT themed work we had to read for this inaugural Polari Book of the Year. It was hard to select just 6 for this shortlist from work of such high quality.”-

Me receiving the Polari Frist Novel Prize

What is Not Said –

Celebrating the Short Story

Divya Vijay, Jan Carson, MS Madhavan & Uday Prakash,  chaired by me.

You can watch and listen to this event on the short story at Jaipur Literature Festival 2019.

It was one of 5 events I did at the festival, some of which I’ve posted on the website.

I hope you enjoy it.

BBC Arts launches ‘ambitious’ new season celebrating the novel

”BBC Arts is launching an “ambitious new season” across BBC TV and radio this autumn with a year-long festival celebrating the novel and a series on how novels have shaped the world.

The centre piece of the season will be the three part BBC Two Series, “The Novels That Shaped Our World”. The series will examine the novel from three unique perspectives: Empire and slavery, women’s voices and working class experiences.  These unique films will argue that the novel has always been a revolutionary agent of social change spearheading shifts in both colonial and post-colonial attitudes, female equality and social mobility.”

I did some filming for this in London. Look out for it later this year. Read more about it here.

Beginnings and Endings

With Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer, Anjum Hassan, Jayant Kaikini and Mahesh Roa.

Here is an hour-long video of an event at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2019.

Jayant Kaikini and me at Jaipur Literature Festival

I’ll be teaching at Writers’ Day at Salisbury Literature Festival on Oct 20th.

“This year the Writers’ Day offers six fantastic sessions. In the morning, award winning novelist, Paul McVeigh (The Good Son) kicks things off looking at the killer first chapter, focusing on that crucial story opening and what agents, competition judges and journal editors look for. Yvonne Battle-Felton, Creative Writing Lecturer, and author of Remembered (longlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction) then leads a session on characterisation. The morning events conclude with a session on description and the senses with Susmita Bhattacharya (prize-winning author of Table Manners.)

After lunch, the afternoon begins with a session on editing with Helen Corner-Bryant, the director of transatlantic literary consultancy Cornerstones and the author of On Editing. We then welcome literary agents Amy Fitzgerald (Blair Partnership) and Charlie Campbell (Kingsford Campbell) who will discuss the submission process and tips on finding the right agent. Concluding the Writers’ Day sessions, we are given an insight into the publishing process as we are joined by John Bond (Director of Whitefox) and Tariq Goddard (Publisher of Repeater Books.)”

Hope to see some of you there.

I’ll be reading at the Embassy of Ireland in London tonight, launching the new Faber anthology alongside Bailey’s Prize winner Eimear McBride, Lucy Caldwell, and Kit de Waal.

Meanwhile…

Storgy Review of ‘Being Various’ Anthology includes a review of my story ‘The Swimmers’.

“Paul McVeigh – The Swimmers – McVeigh delivers a broiling tale which as I was reading gave me a very unsettling vibe. There is something hidden deep within the prose that was disturbing to read and digest, something lurking in the periphery of the story that isn’t uttered but lurks there with a malignant intent. An unspoken secret (possible abuse) sewn delicately throughout the story – but at the heart of the story there is an innocence too, a childlike purity which McVeigh captures mesmerically, the innocence punctuates the story masterfully, blending perfectly with the underlying deep and dark themes that are deftly sewn into the fabric of the story. The Swimmers is about a son who wants to impress his Da, wants his Da to love him for who he is and what he is. He wants to do anything and everything he can to impress him, to spend time with him, to keep swimming with him. No matter the cost, the hurt or the trouble. A very impressive tale from a writer I always enjoy reading – a powerful and gripping story which unsettles the reader…and what a joy it is to be unsettled from time-to-time.”

Thanks 🙂