The 2023 Prose Fiction MA cohort began their course two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging from isolation for a year of intimate, in-person workshops. This experience is mirrored in the immense – at times surreal – vulnerability seen in this anthology’s work. In one short story, a woman faces an unremitting parade of medical appointments. In another, a young man desperately seeks a quiet life but finds himself
repeatedly targeted by lightning strikes. Some pieces deal specifically with the post-pandemic world; all are inflected with a desire for connection and the crossing of distances, through sex, across time or place, and even outside the boundaries of the human, in tales of love affairs with computers or artificial intelligence.

With a foreword by Amit Chaudhuri and an introduction by Tessa McWatt, this anthology offers a luminous showcase of new writing talent.