ABSTRACT
Women short story writers are thriving in Britain, producing work of tremendous range and diversity. Writing short stories for a dissertation encourages the writer to develop, and reflect on, a personal aesthetic; in a newspaper interview, Lucy Wood says she could not have written Diving Belles without the MA programme at Exeter University. Lucy Wood was granted a Somerset Maugham Award for Young Writers in 2013. Individual stories by Carys Davies have been shortlisted for a total of sixteen awards since 2002, including the highly respected V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and the Sunday Times/EFG short story prize. The influence of Angela Carter is very clear in some of the stories in Sweet Home, especially the title story, which is a contemporary fable with a Hansel and Grettel gingerbread house as its central motif. "Bonnet" originated as a contribution to an anthology of stories inspired by the Brontes.
