Output details

Touch

Touch is a collection of 21 short stories ranging widely from the UK to Europe and Africa, exploring the relationship between individual lives, locations, and their histories. Many stories originated in personal experience which was then developed through various forms of action research: working in a sawmill, teaching special-needs children, living in a tower block next to a dying teenager, travelling and working in Uganda. Much of the finished material came about through invention improvised from actual experience and this heuristic method of composition. None were planned in advance, except perhaps at a subconscious level. The underpinning objectives were aesthetic and technical, sometimes ethical or political; opposition to Allied offensives in Iraq, for instance. Such concerns with political oppression, choice and personal liberty, circumstances, contingency, violence and abuse are shown through the range of stories and their subject matter. Each story offers the reader a range of nuances and possibilities and the openness to interpretation this creates was itself a fundamental objective.

Individual stories in the collection were published in The Guardian, The North, London Magazine, The Critical Quarterly; “The Charcoal Burner” was broadcast on BBC R3 and “The Sawmill” on BBC Radio Lancashire. One story, “The Prince”, won the £5,000 Bridport prize for short fiction in 2007 and the entire collection was awarded the £5,000 Edge Hill prize in 2011 (the only literary prize in the UK for a whole collection of short fiction). The collection was also the subject of lengthy critical articles in Thresholds Magazine, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and Mslexia.