The short novel is having something of a moment and award-winning novelist, Carys Davies, is an undoubted master of the form.

Her latest novel, Clear, is another extraordinary contribution to the genre, a perfectly structured, intimate drama set on a remote Shetland island at the time of the Highland Clearances in the 1840s.

Join us for the chance to hear from Carys about why the short novel and short stories have been her writing forms of choice and how, in Clear, she manages to bring to such vivid life the tender story of two very different men, buffeted by history and who share no common language, yet still manage to connect and form a bond.

Carys Davies is the author of Clear (2024), The Mission House (2020) and West (2018), which won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction award, was Runner-Up for the Society of Author’s McKitterick Prize and shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s V S Pritchett Prize, and a Northern Writers’ Award. Davies’ second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2015.