WINNER, EDGE HILL SHORT STORY DEBUT PRIZE 2024
“Visceral and unsettling, beautiful and charming, all at once.” – Meena Kandasamy
A man jumps, the platform empties, then the stories begin. Filled with tales of tragedy, love, hope and frustration, Malachi McIntosh’s debut collection of short stories offers surreal and satirical accounts of the many perils of contemporary life.
‘But she didn’t see. She stands out in the street as it was, in the city as it was.
She was right next to him, standing there right next to him, but she didn’t see.
Matthew texts her as she walks nowhere, rings her when the time for them to meet comes and goes and she’s done three laps of an anonymous block and she answers finally and tells him A man He jumped And I saw it, even though she didn’t see.
She didn’t see.’
Malachi McIntosh’s fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent, and Comma Press’s Book of Birmingham. His short story collection ‘Parables, Fables, Nightmares’ was the winner of the 2024 Edge Hill Short Story Debut Prize, and his stories have been long- and shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize, the Galley Beggar Short Story Competition, Penguin Book’s WriteNow and the Book Edit Writer’s Prize, and commissioned by the National Trust and Lincoln University. Malachi is a recipient of a British Library Eccles Fellowship and a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award and was Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri from 2019-2022. He is currently an Associate Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford.
Read: ‘Limbs’ by Malachi McIntosh, Galley Beggar Press
First lines: The package arrived the same day that my girlfriend and I broke up. It came late, after hours of Emma trying to contact me – first texting in the morning to say that we should talk, then missed calling me at lunch, then texting me again to say I needed to call her in the late afternoon, then missed calling me during my Monday meeting with my line manager, then texting me I found someone else x, at the end of the day.
Watch Malachi McIntosh read from his collection: