ABSTRACT
A. L. Kennedy is one of those rare creatures: a writer who not only works across a plethora of genres and media, has won prizes for novels and short story collections, but also authors non-fiction, radio plays, TV treatments and film scripts. Kennedy keeps insisting that brevity compels short fiction writers to create the effect they want in a flash. Since Kennedy's text primarily addresses practitioners, she makes an effort to explain how exactly the ballistic effect of short fiction is to be achieved: a "strong sense of voice" and a clear "character point of view" are important. When asked whether she sees herself as a "feminist" writer, Kennedy rejects this label, mostly because she considers tags of any kind of little use outside marketing. Some of Kennedy's stories experiment with the ungendering of narrative voice and problematise gender on a sliding scale between mere performance and critical reflection.
