short fiction

  • Sirocco

    The wind whips, scrapes boxes and wrappers across the pavement and into the air, thrashes the treetops. It’s going to be hotter than it’s been for months, they say. Oppressively hot and windy, say the forecasters. You can tell they’ll be right this time, that things will turn out exactly the way they’ve said. It’s

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  • Retreat

    At the beginning of September I joined a group of writing friends for a week-long retreat at a rented house in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The five of us originally met on a writing residency at Varuna in 2016, and have stayed in touch since then. The Sunday before leaving Melbourne, I

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  • 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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  • 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 The clause wasn’t repealed until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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