A literary weekend: a meeting with prize shortlistees, reading with literary icons and a new review of Unthology 7.

On Saturday I zoomed off to London, first to attend a gathering for bloggers to meet the shortlistees of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award, and then on in the evening to Waterstone's Piccadilly to read at Word Factory.

The Young Writer shortlist is fantastic, and we had a great afternoon chatting to the shortlistees and hearing them read and being interviewed by Andrew Holgate, prize judge and Literary Editor of The Sunday Times (below). You can read more about it on my critical blog, Fictionbitch, and the thoughts it prompted for me concerning innovative fiction and marketing.

After that it was off to Word Factory. I was reading with Lionel Shriver and novelist and Mslexia editor Debbie Taylor, at the end of a day-long festival for short-story writers, Small Like a Bullet. I read the title story from my collection, Used to Be (and the really great audience was gratifyingly receptive, laughing in all the right places - I guess a roomful of storytellers was just the right audience for a story about story-telling!). Debbie then read from her latest novel Herring Girl, which I have recently read: a fascinating and really quite daring tale of reincarnation set exactly where she lives, in a converted lighthouse at the mouth of the River Tyne, with a depiction of the past so vividly real and particular that I suspect Debbie of having indeed been there then! Finally Lionel entertained us with the tale of her commission from a luxury hotel chain, which she fulfilled by writing a story subverting the whole idea of luxury hotels. She then read us the story, in which, with her customary verbal irony, she put paid to the notion of luxury itself.

Afterwards poet and Word Factory organiser Cathy Galvin chaired a discussion that ranged from the the popularity or otherwise of short stories and publishers' attitudes to them, to the question of whether they are leading to brand-new forms that defy categorisation - Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers, one of the shortlisted books in the Young Writer Award, being cited as an example. Here's a photo taken by my online friend and Word Factory regular Oscar Windsor Smith:

And as I was coming back on the train next day, I discovered that there's a new review of Unthology 7 from brilliant writer Aiden O'Reilly. He loves the anthology:

I think this is probably the best anthology I’ve read, including all those ‘best new’ anthologies that come out every couple of years. There are just so many standout stories here

and I am of course thrilled by what he, such a talented writer himself, says of my story:

I loved the prose of Elizabeth Baines’ Looking for the Castle ... it’s just perfectly written.

Reading at Oren in Caernarfon

Every so often you do a reading that's really different and off beat. John and I are in Wales at the moment, and the week before last I did a reading in the tiny Oren restaurant in Caernarfon which Gert Vos runs, providing a different, and always exciting, set menu each week. Occasionally on a Thursday, Gert will put on some kind of entertainment for diners, and he had invited me on this particular Thursday to read between courses.

With a necessarily small and select audience mellowed by wine and the most delicious food, it was probably one of the nicest, cosiest readings I've ever done, rather like reading round the dinner-table at home to a group of friends - not that I've ever done that! Gert had decided to do a Welsh menu for the evening, and there was a choice of starters, but then the way we all ordered made him suggest that we all sample some of each, and everyone agreed with delight. So before I began reading I was already almost too full to do so with mackerel salad, battered courgettes (with flowers intact) and Welsh vegetable spring soup. When everyone had finished the first course, those on the ground floor swung their chairs around to face me and those upstairs came down, and I read. I had decided to read food- and restaurant-related pieces, and at this point I read 'Condensed Metaphysics' from Balancing on the Edge of the World, which though set in a very different kind of restaurant from Gert's - a pizza takeway on Manchester's Oxford Road - features a set of customers relating and chatting in just the way we were already doing. And indeed, as Gert served up the next course - Anglesey lamb for carnivores and delicious Welsh goat's cheese with broadbeans and homemade oatcakes for us veggies - there was chat about some of the issues in the story, and about writing. People also asked me about 'Compass and Torch' (because it's on the AQA GCSE syllabus), which I had in fact considered reading, as it was the area above Caernarfon at the start of the Nantlle ridge that had inspired it. After the main course I read a section from The Birth Machine with its strong theme of cooking and witches' brews and spells, and then finally we all went quite quiet as we tucked into one of the most delicious puddings I've ever tasted (I think maybe puddings are Gert's specialty): summer fruit crumble with Caerphilly cheese.

It was an evening I'll remember for a long time: such a friendly, interested audience - in spite of the distraction of the food! - and they even asked to buy books, which I hadn't really expected!

Here's a photo of an earlier meal I had at Gert's: the starter for the Danish summer menu: