Our 2025 Award closes on 31st March. In FOUR weeks. Maybe if you are entering,
you are at the stage where you are thinking about a title. Maybe you began your short story with a title in mind? Maybe your story is still percolating before any words get down on paper?
How do you create a good title? So much has been written about this. Good ones stay with you for ever. I love Raymond Carver’s famous short story title, which is also the title of one of his collections, “What we talk about when we talk about love.” Gordon Lish, his editor, retitled it “I Am Going to Sit Down.” but thankfully, it was never published in that version.
There’s a fun thing I saw recently somewhere online, which suggested writing bad versions of famous titles of novels and short stories. For example, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ could be ‘The Fruits of Anger’. Worse, another Steinbeck novel. ‘Of Mice and Men’ could be translated into ‘Of Rodents and Males.”What about this version of “Sons and Lovers” — ‘Offspring and Their Romantic Partners’? Or ‘Fondness in the Season of the Plague’. Silly, but useful to study the originals and see how they work. Is it the weight of the words, or what they encompass about the book or the short story. Is it the rhythm or the length of the title? Continue reading
We’d like to welcome Sarah Hegarty, who’s joined our team of readers for the 2025 Bath Short Story Award. Sarah recently published her debut collection of short stories 
Bath is well-known for its literary associations, the most famous being Jane Austen, who spent only a few years in the city and had a conflicted relationship with it. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane wrote of her ‘happy feelings of Escape’ on leaving. That said, Bath is mentioned in all her novels and features most prominently in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, where the heroine Catherine Morland declares ‘Oh! Who can be ever tired of Bath?’ Certainly not the thousands from all over the world who will gather here this year to attend the balls and events to mark the 250th anniversary of Jane’s birth. 
Our BSSA 2024 Anthology is now for sale from our publisher
Lucy Luck started in publishing as an assistant at Rogers, Coleridge & White before setting up her own agency in 2006. In 2014 she formally joined Aitken Alexander Associates and in 2016 she moved to C&W. Her authors have been listed for and awarded numerous prizes including the Rooney Prize, the Orange Prize, the Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Irish Book Award, the Costa Novel Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the British Book Award Newcomer of the Year, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, the EFG Sunday Times Short Story Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Impac Dublin Literary Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Encore Award.
Liv Bignold joined Conville & Walsh in May 2024 as assistant to Sarah Ballard, having previously spent two years at Curtis Brown supporting Alice Lutyens and, prior to that, Karolina Sutton. She has experience working on books that span all genres, and is enjoying getting to know Sarah’s exceptional roster of authors. Alongside her day-to-day workload, she provides editorial feedback to students enrolled on Curtis Brown Creative courses. Before deciding to pursue a career in agenting, she worked in Contracts at HarperCollins and in Rights at an educational publisher. She holds a first-class honours BA in English Literature from the University of Exeter.
A big thank you to everyone from around the world who entered our 2025 Award which closed at the end of March. We appreciate your support. As usua, it was a hectic final weekend with entries flooding in and our team is now busy reading your stories. 