“It’s about becoming attentive, slowing the mind to create space for a poem to breathe. I am in dialogue with mystery, time, and with space.”

We chatted to award-winning author Emily Bitto about how focusing on sentences can carry the narrative forward, tips to avoid clichés and authors who taught her to pay attention to the sentence.

“I adore that the short story allows an incompleteness that is self-sufficient, a lightness that carries heft, an accessibility that is complex yet eloquent.” We spoke to award-winning author Eugen Bacon on the short story form.

“Oh I think writers’ centres are so important! They create a chance to learn, to connect and communicate, to share ideas and knowledge, and build a sense of community among writers, who spend so much time alone. I encourage anyone who loves to write to join! Even if writing is not to be your career, it is still a place where you can meet kindred spirits and explore something you love to do.”

“I like to write myself into the story and get to know characters through their interaction with each other. Dialogue is hugely important for me to discover who they are, their relationship to each other, and that wonderful thing of what is not said, or what they actually think.”

“It is events, people, eras and the stories hidden in them that move me to write.”

“Early on in my writing career, I wasn’t quite skilled enough to control a longer and more complex YA narrative. There’s a lot involved in writing strong and impactful stories for teens – their bullshit meter is finely tuned so we as writers have to make sure what our writing will resonate with their core truths and that takes a lot of practice and craft.”