Irrevocable Change
Write a story in which there is an irrevocable change. The whole story can be a process of change – a woman, for instance, transforming into a fox – or the story can be building towards a moment of revelation, of epiphany.
But crucially, by the end of the story, something needs to be fundamentally different than it was at the start – something needs to have been lost, gained, understood, apprehended, glimpsed. It doesn’t need to be huge, but we do need to understand that after this moment – for better or for worse – things will, can, never be the same again.
Lucy Caldwell
ABOUT LUCY:
Born in Belfast, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, three collections of short stories, Multitudes, Intimacies, and most recently Openings (Faber, 2024), and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019).
Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2021 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for “All the People Were Mean and Bad” and in 2022 she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Her website is www.lucycaldwell.com and she is on Instagram at @peopleearthskystars