GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2025/26
Ten questions with GBP Short Story Prize author Lucy Campbell
HELLO LUCY AND CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE LONGLISTING FOR ‘TWO ROOSTERS’. CAN YOU INTRODUCE THE STORY TO OUR READERS, IN TWO OR THREE SENTENCES?
The story is set within the lovely place of friendship, on a random Tuesday. A debatably sadistic salon haircut happens to Jamie, followed by a restorative re-cutting of Jamie’s hair by Jammy, during which she reveals some upsetting news, and Jamie decides they must take action.
AND CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE INSPIRATION FOR THE STORY: HOW AND WHEN DID IT COME TO YOU, AND HOW DID YOU SET ABOUT WRITING IT?
I first started this story back in 2024, using a problematic email from a university tutor as the story event, the email is printed out and chewed over, literally and figuratively, but it wasn’t working, it was too conceptual and I wasn’t listening to the characters. There was a separate story I was working on, inspired by a terrible haircut my oldest sister had (she refused to go to school for two weeks). The story was set in a house that literally splits in two the with this huge furious energy triggered by the violating haircut. The house splitting was inspired by Gordon Matta Clark’s artwork (‘Splitting’) in which he cut a house in two, vertically, so the roof was open to the sky. It only exists in photographs now, but they are beautiful. In my story, which was also a hidden abuse story, the house splits with anger. But I was loading too much on, and had to massively pull back. I lost the split house and changed the sisters to friends, then it came together and flowed. I loved spending time with Jammy and Jamie.
IT SEEMS TO US THAT ‘TWO ROOSTERS’ TELLS THREE STORIES – ONE ABOUT THE PROTAGONIST AND HER TEACHER, ONE ABOUT JAMIE AND HIS HAIRCUT, AND ALSO ONE ABOUT TWO FRAGILE FRIENDS, THEIR RELATIONSHIP AND LOVE OF EACH OTHER. DO YOU THINK THIS IS TRUE – AND, IF YOU DO, WAS GIVING EACH OF THOSE STORIES SPACE A COMPLICATED THING TO MANAGE?
Yes! Interestingly, this tussling for position is reflected in the titles I had for the story at different times. For a while it was ‘Splitting’, then for ages it was ‘Mr Wolf’, then it was ‘Alexander’s Technique’. Even after I’d severed off the split house, the two men kept on pushing themselves forwards until I decided to mute them, and roll along with Jammy and Jamie and let them run the story. They chose to watch a lot of TV and do as little as possible. I called it ‘Two Roosters’ because the image of the two friends on the sofa wrapped in blankets, watching TV, in Jamie’s mother’s lipstick, is really the core image of the story.
THERE ARE SOME TRULY WONDERFUL DETAILS IN ‘TWO ROOSTERS’ – THE PIGEON, THE WAX DOLLS… DID THESE SIMPLY APPEAR TO YOU IN MOMENTS OF INSPIRATION, OR ARE THEY THINGS THAT YOU HAVE COLLECTED AND STORED, FOR THE RIGHT MOMENT? (CLEARLY, ATTACHED TO THIS QUESTION: DID YOU, IN YOUR EARLY TWENTIES, MAKE A WAX VOODOO DOLL?)
I do collect things that I love, and these were both waiting for just the right moment. We have a lot of pigeons in Manchester, on the old buildings in the falling-down bits of the city, and they do have little gardens on the rooftops and gutters, where saplings and greenery have seeded. They are pretty alpha and territorial, afraid of no one. And they stare like that.
The wax dolls were definitely something my middle sister and I thought about, but would have been seriously scared to actually do, though we did spend a lot of time making things like mice with coats on. We were too believing. We had a hardback book called Bella about an evil Victorian doll with a wax figure hidden inside her that caused bad things to happen. The book terrified us so we took it to the library one day and left it on a shelf. It’s probably still there doing bad juju.
OK! WRITING IN GENERAL. TELL US ABOUT YOUR ROUTINES – OR LACK OF THEM.
I try to write every day, first thing in the morning, before I do anything else. This is my most creatively expansive time, before any rational thought sets in. I’m never as productive later on in the day, so I use that time for other work. If I don’t get time to write, I become agitated and stop functioning as a human. I can manage a few days away, but after that it’s difficult. It owns me and not the other way around.
I tend to have a few projects on at any one time and I move between them, backing off from one, to let it breathe, while I work on another. The ideas in one story can cross-pollinate another. I find characters talking to each other across projects.
WRITING AND REWRITING: WHAT’S YOUR RATIO?
My writing and rewriting ratio is hugely weighted to rewriting. I probably go through twenty or thirty drafts of any story. I love the initial rush of ideas, and getting that down on paper, but the real work is enlarging and deepening, and making it into something structured enough to do its work out in the world. When I studied fine art, my tutor would ask, ‘what is the work doing?’ as if the work was separate to me, behaving independently out there in the world. This has been hugely helpful in writing. It takes time for a story to be independent, and that’s when it’s ready.
WHAT’S THE WORST PIECE OF WRITING ADVICE YOU’VE EVER RECEIVED – AND THE BEST?
I spent many years making films. I’d say the film industry is guilty of over-interference in script writing, and trying to second guess the trends, not allowing enough rawness to spring up. Writing fiction feels like a giant free space where I can run about and do what I want. So far.
Aside from a Billy Wilder quote about film which I try to keep in mind: Make movies about things you care about. What’s the point otherwise? The best advice I’ve had is to read the work out loud, to see how it is behaving, which goes back to my art school tutor’s ongoing question, what is the work doing?
OTHER WRITERS. TELL US ABOUT SOME YOU ESPECIALLY ADMIRE. ALSO WHAT YOU’RE READING AT THE MOMENT.
Books from the past few years that I keep going back to: Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett, Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann. I give these books away to friends and then have to buy another copy because I can’t be without them. There’s something in these that hits a spot behind my brain; they use language to somehow speak beyond it, reaching my subconscious, as if describing something I knew but had never articulated. Timna Fibert’s short story ‘Signs and Wonders’ does this (the GBP short story prize winner in 2023). It was a game changer just to read something that spoke to me, that I loved so much. Her communication via language is both playful and transfiguring, and there is a deep empathy and humanity within the story that continues to radiate outwards beyond the reading of it.
Recently I have adored Pan by Michael Clune, Ultra-Luminous by Katherine Faw. I left Frankie McMillan’s short story collection The Wandering Nature of Us Girls on a train recently, half read, and mid-adoring it, which made me very sad.
I am a Sheila Heti devotee, loved her recent piece, Good Medicine.
I am currently reading Jean Genet’s The Maids, as a reference for a longish story I am writing. I had to know exactly what The Maids do.
At the moment I am a bit obsessed with these poems: James Schuyler’s The Trash Book, and Buried at Springs, Alice Notley’s To My Father, and Nick Laird’s Talking to the Sun in Washington Square, and Feel Free.
AND HERE’S A SPOT TO NAMECHECK ANY OTHER FAVOURITE THINGS: ARTISTS, ARTS, FILMS, CINEMAS, TV, MUSIC… WHATEVER YOU LIKE.
I adore Karen Green’s exquisite artist’s book Bough Down about the death of her partner David Foster Wallace. It’s in the books I have to own category.
I love French artist Sophie Calle, and am currently looking again at her pieces Exquisite Pain, and L’Hôtel, and also Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits, for the short story I am working on.
I have spent a lot of my life watching films. Recent favourites are Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value which is now in my top ten films of all time, which includes Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun.
“THE HORROR OF THE BLANK PAGE.” DO YOU FEEL THAT HORROR? AND HOW WOULD YOU ADVISE OTHER WRITERS TO GET BEYOND IT?
For me the horror is facing something I have spent a lot of time on, that isn’t really working, and I am having to face failure. Sometimes I use writing exercises to unfasten my thinking.
This exercise was suggested by the poet Liz Berry as a writing warm-up: Pick out a random poetry book, open it at a random page, and write out the last line of a random poem – and use this as your first line to start free writing for a set time, say, fifteen minutes. I did it yesterday. The line I found was, but the face of a stranger. It’s amazing how this exercise can open you up. I think because by using someone else’s line as a starter, you can get away from yourself for a while.
LUCY CAMPBELL is a writer and doctor based in Manchester, UK. After a BA Hons in literature and creative writing in Sheffield, she trained as a medical doctor, working as an inner-city GP in Manchester. She also trained and worked as a medico-legal report writing doctor with asylum seeker charity Freedom from Torture, working with individuals to detail their experiences of torture to support their asylum applications. She has written and directed award winning narrative short films with BFI, Film4, Film London and Fox Digital/Hulu. She won the Aesthetica International Creative Writing Prize 2023/4 with the short story ‘Mr Street’, and has a story in the US journal Hypertext. She has work in collections with Aesthetica, Comma Press and The Manchester Anthology. She has four children.