Book Review Competition 2025: The Results

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing ran a book review competition. The competition was open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. You can read more about it here. 

The standard of entries was very high indeed - every entry we received was professional, well-written and eminently publishable. Results of the competition are below. First prize is £100 in gift vouchers. There are also two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers, plus three "Honourable Mentions." All winning entries will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next week or so. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Results

1st Prize: Lee Wright, for his review of On Agoraphobia, by Graham Caveney

Runner-Up: Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, for her review of The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

Runner-Up: Iain Minney, for his review of The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

Honourable Mention: Wiktoria Borkowska, for her review of I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Honourable Mention: Kathy Hoyle, for her review of Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers

Honourable Mention: Kimaya Patil, for her review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

Nearly Summer Student News 2023

Lots of things have been happening in the Centre for New Writing and Creative Writing at Leicester in the last two months, including wonderful guest lectures and masterclasses by Val McDermid, Louis de Bernières and Barbara Cooke. Below is a selection of recent Creative Writing student news. Wishing everyone a great Summer!

Rosalind Adam, MA Creative Writing graduate, has a poem published in the new issue of Under the Radar Magazine. 

Asma Ali, MA Creative Writing student, has written a review of As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Joe Bedford, whose story "The Christening" has been shortlisted for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2023. And of course congratulations to Joe on the publication and launch of his novel, A Bad Decade for Good People. You can read more about the novel here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing student Laura Besley, whose story "Barren Land" was shortlisted for the Brilliant Flash Fiction Writing Contest 2023. You can read the story here. She has also been shortlisted for the inaugural Welkin Writing Prize. Her story, "One More Minute," has been published by 50-Word Stories here. Laura has reviewed Joe Bedford's new novel, A Bad Decade for Good People, on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to Constantine, MA Creative Writing graduate, on the publication of his new picture book, Tiya and the Minotaur. You can read more about the book on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to Andrew Craven-Griffiths for completing his PhD in Creative Writing, entitled In the Future We Are Astronauts.

Congratulations to Tim Hannigan, PhD Creative Writing graduate, whose new book, The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey, was published by Head of Zeus in May. 

Congratulations to Kathy Hoyle, PhD Creative Writing student, who was shortlisted for the Ellipsis Zine Flash Collection Competition 2023. She has also had her story, "Anechoic Chamber," published by Fictive Dream here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Amirah Mohiddin has continued her work as tutor in schools for The Brilliant Club, teaching a course she designed called "Our Future Storytellers: Reviving Old Traditional and Classic Stories in a Contemporary Form." You can read more about the course here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Jane Simmons has written a review of Kitchen Music, by Lesley Harrison, for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

MA Creative Writing graduate Lisa Williams has had her stories, "The New Term," "The End" and "Satisied" published on Friday Flash Fiction. She has also written reviews for Everybody's Reviewing here and here.  

The End of the Beginning: Endings in Short Stories

By Dan Powell

The end of my first year as a full-time PhD student in Creative Writing is fast approaching. It’s a landmark in my studies that seems double-weighted given the focus of my research-led creative project: the endings of short stories.

Over the last year I have read hundreds of British short stories from across the last 200 years, compiling lists of sample stories for four self-selected periods of focus. I’ve experienced the breadth and depth of endings on offer, in a dizzying kaleidoscope of style and structure and voice. The goal of this research is to identify structural and linguistic trends at work in the sentences that create closure in the story. The data from the initial reading study will be used to build writing frames which I will use in crafting the study's creative element: a collection of short stories. 

I had hoped, back when I began drawing up the proposal for this piece of research-led practice, that examining the endings of so many stories might make writing the endings of my own stories a more straightforward activity, that writing endings would cease to be so damnably hard, or failing that, that they would be, at least, a little easier. Alas, wrestling my own endings into submission remains a complex and exhausting exercise. 

However, completing the analysis of fifteen contemporary British stories written and published between 1995 and 2015, and reading hundreds of other stories written between 1800 and 2015, has sharpened my understanding of this, the slipperiest feature of any narrative. So here’s the top five things my first year of PhD study has taught me about endings in short stories:

1. There are as many ways to end a story as there are stories. Don’t let your How To Guide to Writing tell you different. Every story needs its own unique solution (or negative solution in the case of contemporary British short stories). The greatest short stories were all lucky enough to have an author who took the time to find that story’s own unique ending.

2. Don’t be happy with the first ending that comes to mind. The first thing you think of is almost never the most fitting, or indeed surprising, ending for the narrative you have set up. Take the time to explore the weirder, darker, more hidden corners of your story. Or if the story is driving inevitably toward an ending that is visible from a distance, find a way to veer off just enough to make it memorable, to make it strange. 

3. The most effective endings are those you feel rather than those you have to think about. Endings aren’t about tying up the reader’s understanding of what they have just read with a neat little bow so they can take it away like a party treat. Endings are not a take-home message in a PowerPoint presentation. Endings should be a punch to the gut you weren’t expecting, a slap in the face you didn’t deserve; they should be the unanticipated stroke of a stranger’s fingertip across your skin.

4. Endings are as much about the journey as the end. My research maps (in part) the staging of closure within my sample stories. All of the stories I have studied feature preclosural sentences that mark the end of alternative stories within the overall final story, which is itself marked by the story’s final sentence. Each preclosural sentence, each alternative story, is a stepping stone to an ending. In a short story the end is both imminent and immanent. Build steps toward closure into the very fabric of your stories.

5. The real end of a short story happens off the page, somewhere in the post-narrational thoughts of the attentive reader. It seems Chekhov was right, short stories are, in fact, all middle. Or as Carver put it, "Get in, get out, don’t linger." Or as Vonnegut half-said, "Start as close to the end as possible" and stop just before you reach it. Of course, this means that even the final closure sentence of a story is preclosural. 

In short, there are no easy fixes. Endings are slippery beasts. Sometimes you have to wrestle them to the floor and pin them down. Sometimes you have to let them loose and pick up the pieces afterwards. Sometimes you have to stalk them from a distance, until they get where they have always been going. Writing a story that can stand on its own four legs is all about being able to tell when to do what.


About the writer
Dan Powell’s debut collection of short fiction, Looking Out of Broken Windows, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. The recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Brookleaze Grant and Society of Authors Award, he is currently a Midlands3Cities-funded Doctoral Researcher in Creative Writing at University of Leicester and a First Story Writer-in-residence.