Lisa Blower

I am an award winning short story writer and novelist often working in the working-class fictions genre. I won The Guardian's National Short Story competition in 2009, have been shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award (2013) and longlisted, shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize (2015. 2016, 2017). My debut novel Sitting Ducks (Fair Acre Press, 2016) was shortlisted for the inagural Arnold Bennett Prize (2017) and longlisted for The Guardian's Not the Booker, The Rubery Award and The People's Book Prize (2016). My short fiction features in various Comma Press anthologies, has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and published in The New Welsh Review, The Luminary and Short Story Sunday. I have just completed my short story collection It's Gone Dark over Bill's Mother's which draws heavily from my Potteries childhood, and second novel, Green Blind, a contemporary re-imagining of Mary Webb's Gone to Earth. I am a regular contributor to The Word Factory, a short story salon, Arvon tutor, and member of the European Network for Short Fiction Research and the Centre for Studies of Home.

Along with my interest in working-class literature and the short story form, I am interested in matters of autogeography and autogynography especially in online cultures. My doctoral thesis Telling Blogs: An overview of the female's autoblographical experience, was published as the article It's Because I am a Woman: Realizing Identity to reconstruct Identity for the female autoblographical inquiry (Convergence, 2014), and also lends to the article Embracing Modes: How the Short Story Practitioner employs the Online Publisher (2018). My essay 'A Pear in a Tin of Peaches' was longlisted for The Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize (2017) and will appear in full in the forthcoming Common People (ed) Kit De Waal, (Unbound, 2018).

I am currently working on my third novel, Pondweed, and a creative non fiction project that discusses my writer in residence experience in 2016, There was Something about Mary.