Louise Finnigan’s ‘Muscle and Mouth’ will form part of the Fly on the Wall Shorts Season. In Louise’s story, protagonist Jade’s university prospects rest on a piece of coursework. To complete this assignment, she must record and analyse the conversation patterns of her three male friends. Doing so forces her to interrogate her relationship to home and the community she has grown up in on a Manchester council estate. This story is clever and affecting, and ultimately celebrates the character’s origins and the speech and culture of Manchester. Yet while Jade’s trajectory is away, other characters seem doomed to remain in repeated cycles of violence.
Louise Finnigan lives and writes in Manchester. Her work has been longlisted for The Mairtin Crawford Award and shortlisted for The Cambridge Short Story Prize. Last year, she was a finalist in The Manchester Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared, and is due to appear, in various anthologies and she has been published online with Storgy. Louise is interested in writing from the perspectives of working-class teenagers who are negotiating their identity in a world which requires them to change themselves if they are to ‘escape’. Her stories are set on council estates, in high-rise flats and failing schools and aim to present the complexity of situations which might be easily dismissed as non-literary. All settings are Mancunian or linked to the city in some way, and all characters are drawn with love.
To express early interest in reviewing Louise’s story, please get in touch with Isabelle Kenyon via Flyonthewallpress@hotmail.com.
'Muscle and Mouth' will be released in June 2021.
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