This Is Danny

I haven’t been allowed to say anything about this up to now. I was shortlisted for the 2023 Jane Austen Literary Foundation’s short story competition. Didn’t win – the story that did was very clever and a touch spooky, whereas mine was pretty clunky (it was a last-minute substitute for a much darker story that I wrote out halfway and then disliked).

Mine was based on a woman I met at an Open University residential school some twenty years ago. We were sitting waiting for our lifts home, and she was nose down in a book, completely ignoring me. She did apologise, when she finally looked up to turn a page. She explained that she had dyslexia, and that her school had completely missed diagnosing it. She’d learned to read in her early twenties and now she read constantly, trying to catch up. I think the book she had was one of the Winnie the Pooh stories – something I read at eight years old. What has stayed with me is the look on her face – just so excited to be finally able to read all these books. She couldn’t stop smiling.

As the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation was set up as a charity to promote literacy skills, it felt like this was the ideal story to tell. My fiction based on that woman – a story called ‘This Is Danny’ – will be included in an audiobook of the three finalists later this year. The proceeds of the book will go to the JALF charity. Nothing to me. I don’t care. I’m chuffed just to be published.