Exeter Writers

  Paul Batterham is a writer based in Exeter, where his short fiction draws on Dartmoor folklore, local history and the uncanny edges of modern life. He also makes the Exeter Stories podcast, documenting the city's community & cultural life, and lives there with his husband, Mark. What did you start with to create your story - the character, the concept or something else? The feeling of the place. We’d recently returned from a trip to Thailand, and had stayed at a lotus farm with a family. I wanted to evoke how it felt to be in that specific place, surrounded by ruined temples and traditional stilted Thai houses. The characters and concept flowed from that. How long have you been writing and have you had anything published before? I’ve been writing as a hobby for 15 years or so, really as a creative foil to my day job. I’ve not had anything published, as I’ve not pursued it to any great degree. Like a lot of folk, I have loads of ideas, and loads of half-finished stories of var...

  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, wr...

  Susan Swan grew up in Scotland and taught English in London schools before moving to live beside the sea in South Devon where she teaches, writes, swims and enjoys coastal walks. She has been writing short fiction and novels for twenty years and has had some success with short stories.  What did you start with to create your story - the character, the concept or something else? The idea for The Ingredients of Home stemmed from a visit to a self-storage facility. My daughter had stored the furniture and belongings from the flat she’d shared with her former partner. Unlike the protagonist in the story, she’d found a room to rent but there was no space for her stuff. Occasionally, she’d ask me to visit her metal container to retrieve an item and I was struck by how it was laid out as a room. The manager showed me inside a huge warehouse of wooden compartments that had been filled and forgotten decades ago. As he told me stories of divorces and deaths, I conceived of the idea of...

  John Barrett Lee is a Welsh writer, teacher and dad.  His fiction has appeared with Fairlight Books, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place and Nature, and elsewhere.  He won the Ironclad Creative Short Story Competition and has been recognised by prizes including the Historical Writers' Association Dorothy Dunnett Award.  Find him on Instagram and X @johnbarrettlee What did you start with to create your story - the character, the concept or something else?
 I can't remember exactly, but in my childhood, grandmas always seemed to have pianos and knew how to play them. I also love Pixar's Coco and cried at the scene where Miguel plays the secret song to his great-grandmother. My grandad used to say that all the men in our family have small hands and cry too easily, and he was right. Alfie is my Welsh Miguel. How long have you been writing and have you had anything published before? I studied Creative Writing at university, but then life got in the way and I didn't w...

 Meet the Winners! Morgan Brennan lives in Berkshire and is a member of two brilliant writing groups. He has been writing short stories and flash fiction since he retired. He has had stories published by Flash Fiction Magazine and Secret  Attic and have been shortlisted in the Exeter Short Story competition before. Morgan has also been  longlisted in The Writers & Artists Short Story competition and the Farnborough Flash Fiction  competition. How did you feel when you found out you’d won? I was absolutely delighted. I hadn’t looked out for the results, so the first I knew was when I got the email congratulating me. I had been shortlisted a few years ago in the competition, but this was extra special. Where did you get the idea?   My fictional story of Malachy Doyle comes from an interest in the Troubles. I had viewed the BBC’s excellent documentary series, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland , and read Tim Pat Coogan’s seminal account of the period, The Tr...

 Meet the Winners! Jay McKenzie’s work appears in  adda , Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream and others. She recently won the Fish Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for  the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel,  How to Lose the Lottery   will be published by Harper Fiction Spring 2026. Where did you get the idea?  I was playing around with format and my main goal was to see if I could use something really pedestrian in format - a list - and tell a complete story with emotional pull. Since becoming a mother, I think a lot about my relationship with my beautiful mother and my beautiful daughter and I'm a little sandwich filling between them. I wanted to see if I could write something powerful about those relationships in a rigid structure.  Do you have any writing heroes or favourite authors?  In novels, my writing hero is Rachel Joyce, who just has the most beautifully drawn characters. She...

 Meet the Winners! Jillian Grant Shoichet  endured an idyllic childhood in pastoral southwestern British Columbia (where nothing happens unless someone sets things in motion), which meant that at an early age she became a fiction instigator. Over time, friends and family members have come to accept they will find reflections of themselves in her work. Jillian is most comfortable writing about uncomfortable human experience: love and loss and our quest to find a meaningful balance between the two. You can visit her author website at  www.jilliangrantshoichet.com ,    Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/jilliangrantshoichet/   Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/jilliangshoichet How did you feel when you found out that you’d won? I’d been travelling for about 24 hours – 3 flights from Victoria, British Columbia, to Berlin, Germany – when I received the email from Exeter Writers. I walked in the front do...

 Meet the Winners! We close out this years' competition with an interview with our Devon prize winner, Rebecca Shapland. We hope you've enjoyed reading this years' winning stories and our peek behind the scenes into what inspired them. Maybe it'll be you next year? Rebecca Shapland is a teacher of A Level English Literature and can either be found in North Devon’s middle-of-nowhere, where she grew up, or traipsing the streets of her beloved Exeter. How would you sum up your story in a sentence or two? Slightly dislocated from reality, a small town in Kernow is excited by the arrival of the Minerva, a ship headed for the Americas. Young Jeremiah is focussed on looking after his father’s shop which sells miniature animals, but his friend Morven has bigger aspirations… How long have you been writing? Is this your first win? My mum is a Librarian and books have always been a huge part of my life. I studied English for my BA and MA, and at uni I had an embarrassing online po...