A. J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize, was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The TLS said of her work: ‘A. J. Ashworth’s first collection of short stories displays impressive versatility. She treats each of her characters to their own narrative timbre – and the stories do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution.’
She is also the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, in aid of The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has won funding such as an Arts Council England grant, a Society of Authors K. Blundell Trust Award and, most recently, a Society of Authors Authors’ Foundation grant. She has previously won the Baltic Writing Residency in Scotland and was also a Hawthornden Fellow. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, and has worked as an associate lecturer there as well as at Lancaster University. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and is currently working as a secondary school English teacher. Her non-fiction essay ‘Eight’, about her panic disorder and anxiety issues was published in What Doesn’t Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival (Unbound, 2020). Her second short story collection Maybe the Birds – containing ‘Leather’ from Best British Short Stories 2021 and other stories that have have won or been listed in prizes – will be published by Gold SF, a feminist sci-fi/speculative fiction imprint at Goldsmiths Press, in 2025.
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