We’re thrilled to be celebrating this year’s Short Story September campaign with a weekend festival hosted by Dahlia Books and its authors.
Join us for a jam-packed programme of events and classes on writing and publishing short stories.
Hosted by short story publisher Dahlia Books, the Short Story September Festival is the ultimate weekend for writers looking to master the art of writing short stories.
Our main festival sessions will take place on Saturday 20th September in Leicester.
Additional writing workshops will take place on Sunday 21st September via Zoom.
All online workshops will be recorded and will be available on playback for up to 30 days.
Book your ticket via the Eventbrite box office.
FESTIVAL PROGRAMME (subject to change)
Saturday 20th September 2025 – Phoenix Square, Midland Street, Leicester
All festival sessions will take place in Meeting Rooms 1&2.
10.30 AM Registration & Warm-up workshop
In this warm-up workshop, we will start generating new ideas for fiction by playing a series of writing games and prompts. Meeting in the Curve Theatre cafe (Rutland Street) from 10AM due to a recent change in opening times at Phoenix. Doors to Phoenix will open just before 11AM.
11.10 AM – 12.10 PM Developing Your Short Story Craft – Panel Discussion
In this panel discussion on developing your craft, writers Catherine Menon, Rebecca Burns, Laura Besley and Jonathan Taylor will share their writing process, the tools and tricks they use to master the short story form, and discuss how and why they return to writing short stories alongside their other works and responsibilities.
12.15 – 1 PM – Interactive roundtable: Is Writing Short Stories Sustainable?
In this interactive roundtable and listening space, we will split up into groups to share our experiences of writing short stories. We will discuss what we’ve heard about working in this form, from family and friends, and publishing professionals and begin to answer the question whether writing short stories is sustainable? If you love the form but are constantly told you should be working on a novel, this session will nourish your soul. This session will be facilitated by Dahlia Books authors. Post it notes, pens and paper will be provided.
1 – 2 PM – Lunch (not included)
2 – 3 PM Abi Hynes and Malachi McIntosh in conversation
Winner of this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize Debut and author of Parables, Fables, Nightmares Malachi McIntosh will be in conversation with Abi Hynes, fellow shortlisted writer and author of Monstrous Longing. This session will be followed by a Q&A.
3 – 3.45 PM Everything You Wanted to Know About a Small Press But Were Too Afraid to Ask
What does a small press do, and how do they support a short story writer get their work out there? How are they set-up and do they pay an advance? From submitting your work to a small press to handling distribution and subsidiary rights, this session is your opportunity to put your questions to Farhana Shaikh and have them answered – with no question off the table! Participants can submit their questions in advance via email to f.shaikh@dahliapublishing.co.uk.
3.45 PM Comfort break / Doors open for ceremony only
4 – 5 PM – Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Ceremony
The Leicester Writes Short Story Prize was set up in 2017 to recognise and reward the best short story writing talent. Join us to celebrate this year’s fantastic long-listed writers and listen to the short stories that made it to our top 20 from just under 400 entries! Our prize anthology featuring all 20 short stories will be launched on the day. Readers on the night include all three winners Laura Besley, Farha Quadri and Matt Cook among others.
Sunday 21st September 2025 – Zoom, online
10.30 AM Registration & Warm-up workshop
In this warm-up workshop, we will mine our personal histories and life experiences to generate material for short stories. You will leave with a handful of fragments and titles. Please bring a photograph of you as a child to the session.
11.00 – 12.15 PM The Significance of Voice Workshop
In this workshop Mona Dash, Catherine Menon, and Reshma Ruia – members of The Whole Kahani – will discuss the crucial building blocks for writing authentically. They will examine different types of voices, cread and discuss their own writing, and give us a peek behind the workshopping process they use to develop their single author collections and their group’s anthologies.
12.15 – 1.30 PM Lunch break – virual brownies and tea for all
1.30 – 2.45 PM How to Pitch a Short Story Collection Workshop
In this session with publisher Farhana Shaikh, participants will learn what makes a good pitch for a short story collection. We will look at live pitches received by Dahlia Books, think about what makes a successful pitch, and have a go at writing and pitching our own collections. You will leave feeling confident in approaching publishers and talking about your stories to absolutely anyone.
3 – 4.10 PM Planning a Short Story in 60 Minutes Workshop
In this workshop with three-time novelist, short story writer and editor Leone Ross, participants will learn how to plan a beginning, middle, and end of a short story in just 60 minutes. You will leave with the bones of a new short story to work on.
4 – 4.30 PM – Plenary
Speaker bios
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’ short form fiction and essays have been published widely in print and online literary journals, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, Leon Literary Review and Paris Lit Up, as well as being anthologised in over twenty print anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio Sounds. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge Literary Magazine’s Flash Nonfiction competition, the Manchester Writing School QuietManDave Prize, and Welsh publisher Lucent Dreaming’s Flash Fiction contest, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of an Arts Council England Award to write a novella.
Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of Sum of her PARTS, (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Sabateur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is currently a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts Council England grant to work on her first full-length collection of short stories. She is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and runs The NIFTY Book Club. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea.
Rebecca Burns is an award-winning writer of short stories. Her story collections, Catching the Barramundi (2012) and The Settling Earth (2014) were both longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Award. She has also been profiled as part of the University of Leicester’s Grassroutes Project that showcases the 50 best transcultural writers in the county. Her debut novel, The Bishop’s Girl, was published by Odyssey Books in September 2016, followed by a third short story collection, Artefacts and Other Stories (2017), a sequel novel to The Settling Earth, called Beyond the Bay, was published in 2018. Her first novella, Quilaq, was published by Next Chapter in 2020. Her linked short story collection, Kezia and Rosie was published by Dahlia Books.
Mona Dash is the author of A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics, winner of Eyelands Book Award 2020 for memoir. Her other published books include two collections of poetry, A Certain Way and Dawn-drops, and a novel Untamed Heart. She has been listed in various competitions, and published widely in various journals and anthologies. She is part of the British South Asian writers collective, The Whole Kahani. With a degree in engineering, an MBA, and a Masters in Creative Writing she works in a global tech company. Mona lives in London.
Abi Hynes is an award-winning drama and fiction writer based in Manchester. Her short stories have been published widely in print and online, including in Black Static and Interzone, and in short fiction anthologies from Boudicca Press, Fairlight Books and Splice. She won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction ‘Novella in Flash’ Award in 2017. Her plays have been performed across the UK, and she has written four episodes of historical audio drama DARK HARBOUR. She also writes for TV, and her script LONG LOST was on the Brit List in 2022.
Malachi McIntosh was born in Birmingham, England, but raised in the United States. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent, and Comma Press’s Book of Birmingham. Malachi is a recipient of a British Library Eccles Fellowship and a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award. Parables, Fables, Nightmares, his short-story collection, was awarded the 2024 Edge Hill Short Story Prize for best debut. He currently teaches English Literature at Oxford University and is at work on a book on the Caribbean Artists Movement.
Catherine Menon is the author of Fragile Monsters, published in 2021 by Viking and shortlisted for the Society of Authors Gordon Bowker Prize and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award. Her debut short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. She has a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing from City University, for which she won the annual prize. She’s won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, London Short Story, Bare Fiction, Willesden Herald, Asian Writer, Leicester Writes, Winchester Writers Festival and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals, including The Good Journal and Asian Literary Review and has been broadcast on radio.
Leone Ross is a three-time novelist, short story writer and editor. Her fiction has been nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths award, the RSL Ondaatje award, and the Edge Hill Prize, among others. In 2022, she won the Manchester Prize for Fiction for a single short story, ‘When We Went Gallivanting’. The Guardian has praised her ‘searing empathy’ and the Times Literary Supplement called her ‘a pointilliste, a master of detail…’ Ross has taught creative writing for 20 years up to PhD level, and worked as a journalist throughout the 90s. Her most recent novel, This One Sky Day aka Popisho was published in 2021 [Faber & Faber]. She is the editor of Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, published in 2022 [Peepal Tree Press].
Reshma Ruia is an award winning writer and poet. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy.’ Her second novel, A Mouthful of Silence, was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Award. Reshma’s short stories and poetry has appeared in British and international journals and anthologies and commissioned for BBC Radio 4. Her debut poetry collection, A Dinner Party in the Home Counties won the 2019 Word Masala Award. Born in India, brought up in Italy and now living in England, her writing explores the preoccupations of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging. She is the co-founder of The Whole Kahani-a writers’ collective of British South Asian writers.
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include the memoir Take Me Home, and the novels Melissa and Entertaining Strangers. Jonathan teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
Host
Farhana Shaikh is a writer and publisher born in Leicester. She established Dahlia Books, a short story publisher from the corner of her kitchen. Farhana won the Penguin/Travelex Next Great Travel Writer prize. She was longlisted for the Spread the Word Life Writing Prize for her memoir about growing up in 1980s Leicester. Her short play Risk was produced as part of Kali Theatre’s discovery programme and staged at Curve Leicester. Her first novel, No Place for a Young Woman was longlisted in the Women’s Prize/CBC Creative #Discoveries2023. She reads for the VS Pritchett Prize and manages the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize. Find her on X/Twitter @farhanashaikh
Bursaries are available for writers on a low income*
Please email Farhana at f.shaikh@dahliapublishing.co.uk to apply for a bursary place demonstrating your commitment to your creative practice and a brief statement on your current circumstances. Please email by 24 th August at the latest.
*Household income threshold of less than £28,500.