Lisa Blower won The Guardian National Short Story Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 and longlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award in 2018.
Her fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies, The New Welsh Review, The Luminary, Short Story Sunday, and on Radio 4. She is a contributor to Common People edited by Kit de Waal.
Her debut novel Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett Prize 2017 and longlisted for The Guardian Not the Booker 2016.
She is a creative writing lecturer at Bangor University, where she studied for her PhD. Her academic interests are the short story, creative nonfiction and working-class fictions. In 2016, Lisa was appointed the first ever Writer in Residence at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England, the residency enabled her to start her second novel, Green Blind, a contemporary re-imagining of Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth that tackles the politics of fracking and land ownership in rural Shropshire.
Lisa was producer and curator of the 2015 Wenlock Poetry Festival, hosted a series of Literary Salons and Creative Writing courses for Shropshire Libraries, is a member of Writing West Midlands’ Room 204, and Arvon tutor. Lisa is currently booked to tutor at the John Osborne centre in Clun in June 2019 with Leone Ross.
Interviews and Features
Make Room for Working Class Writers
“All too often, popular culture, including literature, neglects to reflect working-class life in its diversity. It’s easy to depict rich and poor, north and south, while undermining those who exist in-between. Working-class writing is simply reflecting lives, to paraphrase Alan Bennett, that are generally happening elsewhere.” Lisa Blower features in Kit de Waal’s piece for The Guardian on working-class writing. Read it in full here.
Broken Crockery – Winner of The Guardian short story award 2009
My nan doesn’t like Margaret Thatcher because she’d kicked women in the shins and blew off kneecaps so a working man would know what mercy meant. She said that Margaret Thatcher drove a tank straight through the poor people and was only wearing a headscarf. She said that Margaret Thatcher said that everyone should have a house because that was the law. Mum says houses are greedy old things. Read the full story over on The Guardian website.
Lisa Blower talks to New Welsh Review
Lisa Blower talks to Caroline Stockford of New Welsh Review about her story ‘Johnny Dangerously’, which features in ‘It’s Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s‘, the transition from working to writing life and the importance of writing working-class fiction.
Interview with Mark Lawson on Front Row BBC Radio 4
As part of the BBC National Short Story Award, Mark Lawson talks to Lisa Blower about her interest in working-class fiction and one of her prize-winning stories, ‘Barmouth’, in which a disastrous family trip, or series of trips, sees her narrator travelling from childhood to adulthood.
You can listen again here.