Interview with the 2026 Third Prize winner: Chris Durston
Chris Durston has always thought that writing is just about the only thing he really wants to do, but only recently got around to doing anything about it. He's lived in Exeter all his life and spends as much time as possible by the coasts and rivers with his young family.
What did you start with to create your story - the character, the concept or something else?
I was feeling very, very grumpy indeed. I thought I was reasonably technology-forward until generative AI came along, and now I seem to spend a lot of time and energy being terribly irritated and despairing about the whole thing. There are plenty of things I don't like about it, but the image of AI as this incessantly eating, incessantly shitting hamster got into my brain for some reason, and the story just kind of spilled out in one big gloopy malaise.
How long have you been writing and have you had anything published before?
I wrote all the time when I was a kid, but fell off a bit when I had to do more reading, writing, and general work for school (then college, then university). It's only in the last few years that I've come back to it for pleasure, but in that time I've had a couple of novels published with independent publishers (one about nerds teaching a star how to be human through the medium of, er, nerd things; one about the space whale apocalypse; one about a feud between restaurants in a fantasy city; most recently, a tie-in to a tabletop gaming campaign), as well as a few short stories in anthologies. The latest was in The Power of Place, edited by the Devon-based group Word Kitchen; I've found myself wanting to do more things set in or inspired by the South West lately. It's been home my whole life, and I'm only now realising how much it's shaped who I am.
(Because it's been so ridiculously hot in the UK this week) Does the weather influence your writing?
It does, in that I don't get much done because my hands tend to sweat and that's just no good at all. I'm not a hot weather person, I think it's safe to say.
If you could invite 3 literary characters to tea, who would they be and why?
Don Quixote, for the conversation about his many adventures (and the amusement when he inevitably decides the teapot's actually a mythical monster or something); Samwise Gamgee, because his brand of purity and wisdom would just be very refreshing; Frieren from the manga Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (assuming manga counts as literature, on the hill of which I shall quite happily die if necessary) for a bit of perspective about what's really important.
What will you spend your prize money on?
Other than bills and childcare and all the usual classics, I think I might try to go somewhere nice with my wife for a meal or something. We have two young daughters, so we don't get many chances to do things like that. Alternatively, I had to sell my three-volume History of Middle Earth a few years ago, so perhaps I'll see if I can get that back... (Probably not, though, because I already have zero space for more books.)
What is your writing process, pen to paper or straight to screen?
I wish I wrote more by hand, but I've got really slow at it. (Or I can be fast, but it's completely indecipherable.) I do like to try to keep hand-written notes and outlines, and I think it helps in the early stages when I just need to work through things, but I'm afraid pretty much all drafting is keyboard-based.
You can find links to Chris' work here: linktr.ee/chrisdurston
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