Having lived in Brighton since 2000, Canadian-born writer Alison MacLeod has been a keen supporter of Charleston’s annual short story celebration, starting out as a punter herself.

And it is clear that this year she will be spending as much time in the audience as on the stage herself.

“The short story is one of the most beautiful forms we have and Small Wonder is the best place on Earth to find out more about them,” she says.

“Every year they get the best international writers right in Sussex. I think it’s a privilege to go there both as a writer and a reader. It’s a constantly eclectic programme, with the best international and emerging writers.”

As for this year, she has a few guests she’s looking forward to seeing.

“AS Byatt is always inclusive and interesting,” she says.

“And I’m a great admirer of Deborah Levy – she’s a wonderful short story writer and was also Booker-listed two years ago. She’s someone I want to hear more and more from.”

MacLeod admits her life has got much more hectic since her third novel, Unexploded, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize – although sadly last week she learned it hadn’t made the final cut.

“Even though I didn’t get shortlisted, it is wonderful,” she says. “You see the magic of the Booker – Unexploded is already on its fourth or fifth impression in hardback and it’s only been out six weeks.

“It’s a Brighton-based novel, so it’s lovely to be able to send Brighton out into the world.”

Unexploded traces the story of a family during a year when it was felt the Nazis could invade Britain at any moment.

Banker Geoffrey Beaumont is superintendent of an internment camp for enemy aliens, with special orders should invasion occur. But when his wife, Evelyn, offers to read to the prisoners, she finds herself drawn to a Jewish German artist inmate at the camp.

A discussion about how Brighton rarely provided the backdrop for literary novels – outside Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton – and a trip to London the day after the 7/7 bombings both fed into MacLeod’s initial ideas for the novel.

“I was in London on July 8 for an interview on Woman’s Hour,” remembers MacLeod. “My novel The Wave Theory Of Angels had been released the day of the attack.

“I was too spooked to go on the Tube, so was walking through London. I just remembered this nasty sort of frozen atmosphere and the shock. It made me start thinking about what it was like to live with violence and the threat of terror.”

It made her look into the period of the Second World War after Dunkirk [in 1940], when Brighton “was just waiting for the enemy to walk up the beach”.

“It’s really strange. In hindsight, we’ve practically forgotten what it was like to live with that fear.

“There was speculation that the Germans would land on June 20, then July 4, right through to December 20. People lived with that fear, which is a different kind of fear to London during the Blitz – it was always present. I thought it was an interesting backdrop for a novel.”

She spent a year researching the period, delving into both historical accounts and the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex.

“I wanted to represent a sense of reality,” she says. “Some facts are too big and important to disregard. A novelist works best within the gaps between the facts.”

Certain historical events find their way into the book – including Virginia Woolf’s lecture to the Workers’ Education Association, the bombing of Brighton Odeon in 1940, and the severing of the piers for defensive purposes.

And she also touches on wartime anti-Semetism in Britain through a subplot involving the Beaumont’s child Philip and his relationship with an older schoolmate.

A professor of contemporary fiction at the University of Chichester, having joined the English department in 1990, MacLeod teaches creative writing.

Honing her craft

Having published her own collection, Fifteen Modern Tales Of Attraction, she believes the short story is a good way for a fiction writer to start out.

“To focus on five or ten pages of fiction can really hone your craft,” she says. “It makes you look at what makes prose come alive on the page, to find out what is a cliche and how not to waste words.

“Having said that, the short story is much more than a learning curve for future novelists. As a form itself it is incredible. It has an intensity and urgency that novels can’t sustain.

“There is a wonderful brevity and compression within a great short story and the impact of its finale or twist in the tale is something that can ring quietly after you’ve finished reading.”

Arguably one of the masters of the form is the subject of MacLeod’s appearance at this year’s event.

She will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s birth with the help of actor Juliet Stevenson, who will read one of Mansfield’s stories.

“I hope it will be both an introduction and a celebration,” says MacLeod. “I hope people who don’t know Mansfield’s work will come along and enjoy the reading.

“I will explore the art of Mansfield, thinking about her as a writer and how she wrote. What survives today is a terrific legacy of observation that Mansfield gave us.”

Mansfield died from tuberculosis in 1923, aged just 34. She left behind several collections of short stories, most of which were penned in the last three years of her life.

Unfinished business

“There is a sense of unfinished business,” says MacLeod. “Her notebooks are amazing – she had dramas on the go and the beginnings of a novel. Many of her greatest stories came in a rush when she was absolutely gripped by this attack of writing.

“She was painfully aware of the most likely outcome with her TB. She had tried for years to find treatment, moving to different climates to help her.

“It made it hard for her to write – she often talks about her pen feeling like a walking stick. It was so hard to push out her best stories. I wouldn’t say they were little masterpieces, they are masterpieces.”

MacLeod admits when she first came across Mansfield’s short story The Garden Party as a student, she had almost dismissed it.

“I thought she was quite a straightforward realist,” she says. “When you look at her with a bit more maturity, you see such strainedness and an edge. I don’t know anyone else like her.

“There is a real sense of isolation or loneliness for a lot of her characters. There’s a sense of an outsider looking in, which must be quite a natural outcome for someone who has such a degree of illness. She was from New Zealand and there was often a painful sense of snobbery about being a ‘colonial’ in London.”

Mansfield had links to Sussex – including a friendly rivalry with Virginia Woolf, who once said, “I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf published Mansfield’s longest short story, Prelude, in 1917, and Mansfield regularly visited the couple’s home in Asham, near Lewes. She and Virginia also wrote letters to each other, although none of Woolf’s letters to Mansfield survive.

Mansfield lived in the county briefly, taking a cottage in Runcton for two months with her husband John Middleton Murry, and living in Rottingdean during the early 1910s.

It’s all part of Sussex’s contribution to literature, which MacLeod has been assisting both in her own work and by supporting students at the university.

“The creative writing department at Chichester has had some wonderful successes both with the staff and students,” she says. “So many of the students go on to publish short and long fiction.”

MacLeod has teamed up with Charleston’s artistic director Diana Reich to launch a new award, recognising a lifetime’s achievement in short fiction.

The winner, which has been chosen by a panel of literary experts, will be announced at 11am on Sunday, September 29.

“Short story publishers are becoming really creative in getting stories out there,” she says, pointing to innovations such as iPhone app Gimbal, where readers can travel the world by short stories, downloading specific stories at different locations in the world.

“Companies such as Comma Press, which publishes new collections of short stories, are looking at different ways to discover new stories,” she adds.

“I want the form to go on and on. There is a great pool of talent keeping the British short story alive and well.”

  • Small Wonder: The Short Story Festival takes place at Charleston, Firle, near Lewes, from Wednesday, September 25, to Sunday, September 29. Our Precious Art with Alison MacLeod and Juliet Stevenson is on Sunday, September 29, from 6pm, tickets £9/£8. Call 01273 709709.