Great Britain in Nine Short Stories

I was delighted to learn this week – having been emailed by a teacher in Koblenz, Germany, c/o the RLF – that my short story, ‘Plain Speaking’, which was written to mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of Brian O’Nolan (aka Flann O’Brien, etc.) and first performed at one of David Collard’s ‘Carthorse Orchestra’ online salons, then published by the mighty 3am Magazine, and the Irish Literary Society, then collected in Nicholas Royle’s Best British Short Stories 2022 (Salt Books), is now further collected in a German text book and being taught in grammar schools there, complete with glossing/explanatory footnotes, e.g.

Steven J Fowler (born 1983): British poet, performer and curator of literature festivals.

Find out more about Great Britain in Nine Short Stories, Cornelsen Schulverlage, Berlin 2025 (title only available in Germany)

You can read ‘Plain Speaking’ complete with educational footnotes via the ‘blick ins buch/look inside‘ preview feature at the link above.

Also it’s super cool that German students will now know that The Old Blue Last on Great Eastern Street, London, was (all together now) the first house where porter was sold!

Here’s the contents:

Tony White: Plain Speaking
Tessa Hadley: Pretending
Raman Mundair: Day Trippers
Briony Thompson: The Nights
Lucie McKnight Hardy: Badgerface
DJ Taylor: Somewhere Out There West of Thetford
Alison Moore: Common Ground
Hana Riaz: A Cartography of All the Names You’ve Ever Given Me
Zadie Smith: The Lazy River

I was also asked if there are any online resources, audio etc, relating to ‘Plain Speaking’, and as it happens there is a short video of me reading the story at Bouda Gallery, part of the Czech Centre, Notting Hill, London, this summer as part of an exhibition by the IPLA Collective entitled ‘The Sun Can Be’. (This is not my video, but posted thanks to the IPLA Collective. N.B. Youtube’s AI-generated captions do not accurately reflect the text, so I’d advise switching them off if possible in your browser.)