Welcome to the fourth of our series of interviews with this year’s National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Editors and Microfiction Competition Judges! Submissions for the Anthology and Microfiction Competition are open until 15 February 2026.
This week, Diane Simmons chats with David Swann, one of this year’s Microfiction Competition judges, about various topics including his novella-in-flash, underappreciated authors, and writing advice for microfiction writers….
Diane: Firstly, thank you for agreeing to be a microfiction competition judge.
David: Thanks for asking, Diane!
Diane: Your novella-in-flash Season of Bright Sorrow won the Bath NIF competition in 2021 and went on to be named the Rubery Book of the Year. Could you tell us a little about the novella and what inspired you to write it?
David: The novella came to life after a talented artist called Sam Hubbard approached me during lockdown to suggest a joint project, but its roots stretched back twenty-five years, to an event I witnessed while teaching in prison. Entering the jail, I crossed paths with a distraught young mother, who was escorting two tiny, frightened kids from the gate. They’d been refused entry, through an issue with the mum’s papers – and the children would now travel miles home, on several buses, without seeing their father. It was the elder daughter who haunted me. She must have been about five – a pale, skinny lass, whose clear, blue, truthful eyes ached with hunger. The novella that emerged, working together with Sam, was about a troubled girl, closing in on her teens, who’d been cast adrift in a decaying seaside resort with her alcoholic mother. Her name was Lana, and she’d recently been moved by the authorities into a crumbling boarding-house, closer to the jail where her father was imprisoned for murder. The plight of that child outside the prison had been simmering in my imagination for decades, I realised. Sadness, anger, and curiosity drove me, as I wrote. Had she overcome the odds stacked against her? Was she flourishing or had she faltered? How wide and deep was prison’s shadow?
Diane: You worked for many years as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the universities of Lancaster and Chichester. Over the years you must have given out so much advice to writers. Is there one piece of advice that you think is particularly relevant to those wishing to write stories as short as a hundred words?
David: Yes, I’m an expert at giving out advice that is helpful to everybody apart from me. ‘The soul grows by subtraction.’ That isn’t advice. It’s just something I like thinking about. It’s a quote from the mystic, Meister Eckhart. Flash fiction is short, but it’s also great when it goes deep – when the white space speaks. When the story HAS to be short, because the form and the subject matter form a luminous whole. Or ‘luminous hole’, as one of my students once thought I’d said. Which is better than what I’d said.
Diane: If you could go out for a pizza with one author (living or dead), who would you choose? And what would be your pizza topping?
David: I’d ask Herman Melville to come with me, but I’m not sure he’d accept, or know what a pizza was, or be much fun (if he was in one of his gloomy patches). Maybe if I told him there was a side-order of weevils?
Diane: I understand that you teach at creative writing retreats in Crete and that you enjoy spending time there. Do you ever set stories in countries other than the UK? If so, does this present any particular challenges?
David: Yes, I love travel, and my favourite thing in life is hiking, so I thrive on teaching and writing in other countries, where I love looking back at my life (and things I’ve taken for granted) from different angles. When it comes to writing about those places, I’m trying to learn from a writer-friend called Andre Mangeot, whose short stories are amazing for their use of unfamiliar perspectives (A Little Javanese and True North, both published by Salt). Sometimes I worry I’m not qualified to speak for people from other cultures – or that there’s a power imbalance which ought to be addressed. In the end, you have to work through those concerns, I guess – because fiction is supposed to be an empathy machine which allows writers and readers to pass beyond their own narrow limits. One thing I like doing is grafting my own experiences of travel onto the lives of people very different from me, e.g. my wife and I did road-trips in New Mexico, Australia, and Canada that I’ve ‘given’ to people far more interesting than me, e.g. a ventriloquist with a demonic doll, a refugee from the Bosnian civil war, a Dutchwoman fleeing domestic abuse, etc. It’s interesting to see what happens to the facts when they’re bent by fiction. The poet Marianne Moore thought that this was one of the best recipes for creativity – putting a real toad in an imaginary garden!
Diane: Is there a novel that you’ve read that you think is underappreciated, that you wish more people would read?
David: Too many to mention! I’m a sucker for obscurity and oblivion. I was once the annoying teenage music fan who liked groups until everybody else discovered them – and then I dropped them like bags of dirt, I’m ashamed to say. But I wish more people had heard of Denis Johnson (RIP) and Mary Robison, two US writers I’ve loved for years, partly because their work isn’t always perfect. You don’t quite ever know what you’re going to get with them – as if the creative process is surprising them, sometimes even ambushing them. I really like that double-thing of difficulty and discovery in a writer. They leave everything out there, warts and all. And you forgive them immediately for losing or confusing you when they suddenly hit one of their hot streaks. It’s similar to the way I think about D.H. Lawrence – you slog through page after page of turgid stuff and bonkers ideas, and then suddenly he sets down a passage so clear, it runs across the page, as swift and lucid as a chalk stream.
David Swann is a former journalist and university lecturer, who is now a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Cumbria, where he helps nurses and paramedics with their academic work. His novella, Season of Bright Sorrow (Ad Hoc, 2021), illustrated by Sam Hubbard, was named 2023 Rubery Book of the Year. Dave’s other five books include The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), which was shortlisted in the Ted Hughes Prize for its evocation of a prison residency. In 2025, Dave worked as club poet at Blackburn Rovers Football Club, the team he’s supported since he was six!