Delighted to see this post on Facebook from my publisher. Great news for the short story but particularly chuffed that ‘I Hear You’ is Salt’s bestselling book of 2025. Here’s to the short story!
‘I Hear You’ Salt’s Bestselling Book of 2025
short story collection
Appearance at Folkstone Book Festival
Short Stories: Adam Marek & Paul McVeigh
Sun 23 Nov 2025, 12th – Tickets here.
Two award-winning masters of the short story come together for an unmissable hour of fiction, feeling, and fierce imagination. Belfast-born Paul McVeigh – author of The Good Son and I Hear You and co-founder of the London Short Story Festival – writes with humour, compassion and razor-sharp insight. His work, celebrated internationally, explores working-class life, queer identity and the power of language to wound or redeem.
Folkestone-based Adam Marek – winner of the prestigious Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship and author of The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need – is known for his brilliantly strange, deeply human stories that bend reality and tap into the surreal edge of everyday life.
Together, McVeigh and Marek will read from their work, talk about their playfully different approaches to the form, and explore how short stories can capture the biggest questions in the smallest moments. Expect a rich conversation about craft, vulnerability, play, and why the short story continues to punch above its weight.
A must-attend for readers, writers, and anyone who believes in the power of a well-told tale to shake the world – or shift your soul.
You can also buy my radio short story collection, I Hear You, out now.
Irish Times Review of ‘I Hear you’
Thank you to novelist Neil Hegarty, for this lovely review of, I Hear You, in the Irish Times.
“My mind found an old shoebox full of memories, and as I opened it, the moths of the past flew out”: in The Singer, one of the short stories in Paul McVeigh’s vivid and memorable new collection, we meet a nameless female protagonist as she sifts through the stuff of her life. The scene is an ordinary family home in north Belfast – but as each of these stories reminds us, there is no such thing as an ordinary family or home. Rather, each family, home, life is invariably extraordinary, in myriad ways – and all we need do to see this is to pay attention.
The Singer is a story of sibling rivalry, envy, tension – and to add further to such pleasures, this is also a complex retelling of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The protagonist’s sister (and indeed, her name is Jane) has always been the favourite one, the talented one, the one who triumphed at the local talent competition three years running – though also the one who even as a child liked to take nips from the bottle of cooking brandy in the kitchen cupboard. The other sister has gone off and earned a degree, has been good, has carved out a sensible place in the world – has been thoroughly eclipsed: but now she teeters on the edge of something remarkable, of a longed-for switch in life; and to add to her satisfaction, Jane has taken to calling from London, looking for money. There is sleekness in the telling, there is satisfaction in the glimpse of a happy ending – and best of all, this happy ending will not be for everyone.
The Singer is one element in The Circus, a sequence of linked stories that shows us a multifaceted society, and provides a much-needed corrective to the version of north Belfast glimpsed from time to time in the television news. Each story was originally written for radio, and this genesis explains the collection’s depth of colour and vividness of voice. And its variety: Paul McVeigh’s writing has demonstrated an ongoing commitment to working-class and queer representation, and this sustained energy flows through this collection, to illuminating effect – for this is a world of change, of openness, of the drunkenness of things being various.“
Read here.
Buy here.
I Hear You: RTE Arena Interview
I Hear You – Paul McVeigh
CLIP • 15 MINS • 03 MAR • ARENA
Writer Paul McVeigh on his new collection of short stories, I Hear You.
“It’s been 10 years since Paul McVeigh’s debut novel The Good Sonhit bookshelves, its funny, touching tale of misfit schoolboy Mickey Donnelly’s determination to escape Troubles-plagued Ardoyne earning the author The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award.
Since then he has edited a trio of short story and written a hit play, Big Man, which won an Irish Times Theatre Award when it was staged at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 2022. Now he returns to print with I Hear You a collection of short stories which were originally commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio Four – he talks to RTÉ Arena above.
The collection includes a series of ten interlinked stories called The Circus which introduce a colourful selection of characters from the north Belfast streets, whose varied lives intersect thanks to a local talent competition. Their stories are told with McVeigh’s trademark warmth, wit and humour.”
I talked to RTE Arena about my debut collection of stories ‘I Hear You’
Short Story v The Novel in Bookanista
“I think that’s why a short story can be a good place to start when setting out to write prose. You can experiment with voices, characters, points of view, and so on. If the story isn’t working, you can abandon it and move to another idea. Starting by writing short stories is not to suggest that a short story is merely a stepping stone to writing novels. The short story is a glorious form in its own right, and mastering it can take many years.”
You can read the article here.
Dublin Launch of ‘I Hear You’ March 11
Friends in Dublin and thereabouts please come along to the launch of ‘I Hear You’ at Hodges Figgis March 11th. I’ll be introduced by author Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. Actors Tony Flynn and Tricia Fleming will read short extracts for two of the stories. I hope to see you there.
Please do spread the word. Thank you.
World Book Day, Event in Armagh Library
Please come along on World Book Day, Tuesday 6th March, Armagh City Library, at 7.30pm.
Joining me will be Tony Flynn from TV’s ‘Blue Lights’ who will read one of my stories.
For free tickets p=lease email: armagh.library@librariesni.org.uk
‘I Hear You’ will be published on March 3rd and you can pre-order here.
Pre-Order ‘I Hear You’
Pre-order of ‘I Hear You’ now available at the legendary No Alibis Bookstore, Belfast. A wee exclusive pre-order gift will be announced soon. Be the first in line.
Irish Times: Books to Look Out for in 2025
‘These moving short stories are brave, honest, raw and funny, doing what fiction does best, showing us the lives of others and in so doing showing us ourselves. Wonderful.’ —Kit de Waal
‘From a son paring the bunions on his mother’s feet to a man’s soul getting sealed out of his body, and culminating in a deft interlinked cycle, the stories of I Hear You are warm, frank and unsentimental, bursting with character and idiosyncratic detail, written with Paul McVeigh’s characteristic geniality and Belfast wit.’ —Lucy Caldwell
This collection of stories, written especially for BBC Radio 4, includes a ten-part sequence: ‘The Circus’, set around Cliftonville Circus, where five roads meet in North Belfast. It’s five minutes from the nationalist Troubles flashpoint of Ardoyne, where Paul grew up. It’s close to Holy Cross Girls’ School, where protests targeting primary school children drew international attention.
The Circus is situated in the poorest part of the Belfast – it is also the most divided. Each road leads to a different area – a different class – a different religion. The Circus explores where old Belfast clashes with the new around acceptance, change, class and diversity.
But this is 2024 and a fresh energy exists.
Other stories include ‘Tickles’, a story about a man visiting his mother in a dementia ward where he finds he is the one who had forgotten important things.
‘Cuckoo’, about a man’s collapse and surgery – where he feels something more sinister has happened to him; and ‘Daddy Christmas’, where a gay man writes a letter to the son he never had.
Judge: Edge Hill Prize Longlist Revealed
The longlist for 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize has been revealed. This is the second of the three international prizes I’m judging this year; having judged The Dylan Thomas Prize (culminating two weeks ago) and, upcoming & currently open for entries, The Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition.
I’m so looking forward to reading the best short story collections out in the last year and discussing them wit the other judges.
Here is the longlist for the £10,000 prize…
Kelly Creighton – Bank Holiday Hurricane (Doire Press)
Agnieszka Dale – Fox Season (Jantar Publishing)
Lucy Durneen – Wild Gestures (MidnightSun Publishing)
Tessa Hadley – Bad Dreams (Jonathan Cape)
Sarah Hall – Madame Zero (Faber & Faber)
M John Harrison – You Should Come With Me Now (Comma Press)
David Hayden — Darker with the Lights On (Little Island Press)
James Kelman – That was a Shiver (Canongate)
Alison MacLeod – All the Beloved Ghosts (Bloomsbury)
Sean O’Reilly – Levitation (Stinging Fly Press)
Adam O’Riordan – The Burning Ground (Bloomsbury)
Tom Rachman – Basket Of Deplorables (Riverrun)
Leone Ross – Come Let us Sing Anyway (Peepal Tree Press)
Nicholas Royle – Ornithology (Confingo)
Eley Williams – Attrib (Influx Press)
You can head over the website where they are profiling all the longlisted authors in the Meet the Writers section.
Winner of The Polari Prize & The McCrea Literary Award
“I devoured it in a day, but I’ve thought about it for many, many more. ”
Bailey’s Prize-winner Lisa McInerney
“A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.”
Donal Ryan
Arts Council NI ACE Funding
I’m delighted to have received ACE funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. This will allow me time to write next year. I’ll be working on my first collection of short stories.
Paul McVeigh 