Liz
Kershaw
Welcome to the website of Liz Kershaw, writer of unsettling stories.
About my work
My published and award-winning short stories range from historical to contemporary, covering broad themes of love, loss and life on the edge. My short stories have been included in anthologies published by the Historical Writers’ Association, Mantle Lane Press, Triptych Tales, The Bedford International Short Story prize, Tindal Street Fiction Group and Floodgate Press. My Gothic Novella The Music Maker was published by Mantle Lane Press and I was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition (2021) with my novel, The Fadeling, a tale of motherhood and madness.
In 2019, I was project writer for 'Our Man in the Moone', part-funded by the Heritage Fund, retelling of the first science fiction book written in English (The Man in the Moone, c.1632, by Bishop Francis Godwin) as a prose narrative, live performance script and script for a small animated film. https://ourmaninthemoone.blog/
I have been shortlisted twice for the Historical Writers’ Association Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition and my story Lures won the Bedford International Short Story Competition in 2014. Most recently, my story The Drover was published in Thursday Nights (TSFG, 2023) and my story Intersection has been included in Night Time Economy (Floodgate Press, 2024).
I enjoy performing/reading my work, and have appeared at the Birmingham Literature Festival, the Wolverhampton Literary Festival and many other events.
About me
I was born in Somerset and migrated to the Midlands when I went to Birmingham University to study for a degree in English Language and Literature. I’d wanted to write fiction for as long as I’d been reading it, but the need for a salary took over after I graduated, and I started out on a long career in sales and marketing. That career was a tale of two halves, divided by a spell looking after my children when they were small, and continued until my need to write overpowered all other sensible considerations (money, mortgage, food) and I stepped down from full time employment to devote more time to making a writing career work.
Since that scary day, I have graduated with a First Class degree in Creative Writing, History and Latin from the OU, have studied with Curtis Brown Creative and Arvon, have won three national competitions and have been shortlisted many times. I am a member of the prestigious Room 204 emerging writer development programme run by Writing West Midlands and a member of the Tindal Street Fiction Group (Birmingham).
