Travelling back to her home town with her young.

She doesn’t know what she was expecting but it was not this. Emma Timpanys Travelling in the Dark is an evocative story of a woman coming to terms with her past. Rachel said you wanted someone to grow flowers. Despite his smile, his face is the wrong kind of white. He stands and wipes his hands on his clothes. He wears a suit, some kind of woollen weave, not tweed. She walks over but he does not seem to know she is there. She is about to leave when, looking again, she notices a figure kneeling inside the fencing. Ahead of her is an open-fronted barn with a caravan parked inside it, a chimney rising from its roof. A path runs through long, wet grass towards a gate in the fence. On her left, one part of the closest field is enclosed behind wire mesh.

of Contemporary Cornish Writing and author of the novella Travelling in the Dark. This is the place: four fields in the shape of a rough parallelogram. Our new Short Story of the Month is Flowers by Emma Timpany. ‘Flowers’ follows a woman who is hired to plant flowers on an unusual man’s land. Emma is married and has two teenage daughters. She is a member of the New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa (PEN NZ Inc). Her stories have won competitions including The Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust Award and have been published in literary journals in England, New Zealand and Australia. She is co-editor of the 2018 short story anthology Cornish Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary Cornish Writing (The History Press). Her 2015 short story collection The Lost of Syros was longlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Prize. This week, we’ve chosen a story about healing by Emma Timpany.Įmma Timpany is the author of the Fairlight Moderns novella Travelling in the Dark, which won the Hall and Woodhouse DLF Writing Prize 2019.Įmma was born in Dunedin, New Zealand but moved to England in the 1990s, after receiving a BA degree in Anthropology from the University of Otago. Each week, we pick a short fiction piece from our Fairlight Shorts archives to feature as our story of the week.

Travelling in the Dark by Emma Timpany