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 work has appeared in The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies, The New Welsh Review, The Luminary, Short Story Sunday, and on Radio 4. These award-winning stories are collected in It’s Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s, set to be published by Myriad in April 2019.
Her debut novel Sitting Ducks (Fair Acre Press) 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
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.