Barry Lee Thompson

  • The story behind ‘Twitch’

    In December 2013, London’s Dazed magazine launched a competition calling for short stories ‘based on surveillance culture’. I’d long been a fan of the magazine, and was drawn to the theme, so thought I’d give it a whirl. I wanted to look at online surveillance, privacy and metadata, and concerns around the trails and traces…

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  • All about Adelaide

    I visited the Vision Australia Radio studios in Kooyong on Tuesday morning to record my story ‘A Standard Night’ for the upcoming Cover to Cover special edition featuring work by Elwood Writers. The theme of the edition is ‘Adelaide’. I wrote ‘A Standard Night’ especially for the program. A friend asked me on Tuesday night…

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  • The story behind ‘The Ministry Man’

    I grew up in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, where the government pursued and actively encouraged intolerance and hostility towards same-sex attraction. A culmination of the Tories’ damaging agenda was Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which forbade local authorities from promoting homosexuality, or from teaching its acceptability in maintained schools. The clause wasn’t repealed until…

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  • The story behind ‘Their Cruel Routines’

    There are two mother-son relationships within ‘Their Cruel Routines’, the opening story in Broken Rules and Other Stories: that between the fictional mother and her adult son, and that between my own mother and myself. The latter was the spark or inspiration for the story. A few years ago, I went to stay with my…

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  • Final days: Fundación César Egido Serrano VI International Flash Fiction Competition

    Es su última oportunidad https://www.fundacioncesaregidoserrano.com/es/ The deadline has finally been announced. We have until midnight Spanish time on Friday December 31 to enter micro-stories for the sixth edition of the international contest of the César Egido Serrano Foundation. Two stories per author, maximum 100 words each, in Spanish, English, Arabic or Hebrew. Details and participation…

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