Small Like A Bullet: with Lucy Caldwell
A new exclusive series: one writer, one story, one in-depth masterclass
WORD FACTORY PRESENTS: SMALL LIKE A BULLET
With Lucy Caldwell
One writer, one story. An in-depth series of exclusive masterclasses running from April to July 2025 on the short story form.
Beginning with Lucy Caldwell and her superb story, Hamlet: a love story.
Join us as Lucy guides us through the motivation for her story, its detail and thoughts on the lessons from that process that might work for you. Over an hour and a half there will be time for questions and a few exercises.
We will send you the story in advance by email. Feel free to contact our host Cathy Galvin by email (cathy@thewordfactory.tv) if you have any queries or want to send in questions in advance.
The event will be filmed and made available to participants.
Other classes in this series include Tom Vowler (May 7th); Jonathan Taylor (June 17th); Kirsty Gunn (July 8th) and Sophie Haydock (July 16).
Please note: Eventbrite tickets for Lucy’s class are available here. Tickets for other masterclasses become available at the beginning of the month in which the class is run.
Paid subscribers you are entitled to one free masterclass in this series, free access to all our short story club events and priority booking.
The Author:
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
Your Host:
Cathy Galvin
Poet, editor and journalist Cathy Galvin is founder of the Word Factory and the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies, most recently The Book of Coventry (Comma Press). She is the editor of Red, the Waterstones Anthology of New Writing and The Guillemot Factory. Her journalism has appeared in national newspapers and magazines including the Sunday Times, Financial Times and The Tablet. Her poetry includes the sequences Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (Guillemot Press), Rough Translation and Black and Blue (The Melos Press). Her collection, Ethnology, is due from Bloodaxe Books in 2026.
Ticket Price includes the Eventbrite admin fee.
If you have any difficulties contact Word Factory director Cathy Galvin at cathy@thewordfactory.tv
Follow Word Factory on Twitter @WordFactoryUK/ on Bluesky @wordfactoryuk.bsky.social and at www.wordfactory.tv where you can sign up to our Substack newsletter.