We have always valued the short story as a way to make sense of the world, and our place in it. New short story anthology ‘Closure’ is essentially about human striving, offering contemporary conversations around different experiences of being British – a lived reality that is like air or breath or blood.

The breadth of this experience is expressed through a variety of form, tone and voice; of stylistic ranges and the richness of its diverse themes. Even the title invites a subversive response and the anthology is filled with stories which, like lives, rarely end in the way we might imagine.

‘Closure’ editor Jacob Ross is joined by Tariq Mehmood, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Leone Ross – all writers featured in the collection – to discuss the anthology, its genesis, and the tales it tells.

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About The Authors

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a writer and lecturer. Her short story, ‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’ won the Commonwealth Short Prize 2014, and her novel, ‘Kintu’, won the Kwani Manuscript Project in 2013, and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize. She teaches at Lancaster University and lives in Manchester.

Tariq Mehmood

Tariq Mehmood’s novels include:Hand On the Sun, Penguin 1983; While There Is light, Comma;You’re Not Proper, HopeRoad, 2015 and Song Of Gulzarina, Daraja 2017. He was a central defendant in a case known as the Bradford 12. He was acquitted. He co-directed the multiple award-winning documentary Injustice.

Leone Ross

Leone Ross was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and her second, Orange Laughter, was chosen as a BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her 2017 short story collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her third novel, This One Sky Day, was published in the UK in May 2021 with Faber & Faber and under the title Popisho in the US.

Jacob Ross

Jacob Ross is editor of ‘Closure’. The author of several critically acclaimed works of fiction, later this year he will publish a Caribbean island set crime thriller, ‘The Bone Readers’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a specialist on the short story and narrative drive.

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