Paul McVeigh & Ross Raisin

Paul McVeigh’s new collection of stories, I Hear You, was written especially for BBC Radio 4 and includes a ten-part sequence: ‘The Circus’, set around Cliftonville Circus, where five roads meet in North Belfast. It’s five minutes from the nationalist Troubles flashpoint of Ardoyne, where Paul grew up. It’s close to Holy Cross Girls’ School, where protests targeting primary school children drew international attention. The Circus is situated in the poorest part of the Belfast – it is also the most divided. Each road leads to a different area – a different class – a different religion. ‘The Circus’ explores where old Belfast clashes with the new around acceptance, change, class and diversity. But this is 2024 and a fresh energy exists. Other stories include ‘Tickles’, a story about a man visiting his mother in a dementia ward where he finds he is the one who had forgotten important things; ‘Cuckoo’, about a man’s collapse and surgery – where he feels something more sinister has happened to him; and ‘Daddy Christmas’, where a gay man writes a letter to the son he never had.

Ross Raisin won the 2024 BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Ghost Kitchen’, a story narrated by a bicycle courier and inspired by the gig economy. ‘Ghost Kitchen’ follows Sean, a young man who becomes a courier after a tragic family incident. Ghost kitchens, or dark kitchens, are food businesses that exclusively serve customers by delivery or pick-up, with no dine-in space and, in an interview in The Guardian, Ross explained that they are “so-called in part because they have no windows, no way for anybody on the outside to see in”; they are “often on the outskirts of urban areas”, “concealed islands that sometimes create the conditions for darkness to flourish.” BBC Audio’s books editor Di Speirs was one of the judges of the BBC National Short Story Award and described ‘Ghost Kitchen’ as “a brilliantly rendered glimpse into life in the edge-lands, [it] combines the tension of a dark plot with an unexpected and moving exploration of male friendship.”