Parables, Fables, Nightmares

Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2024, Debut Collection Award
A man jumps, the platform empties, then the stories begin. Filled with tales of tragedy, love, hope and frustration, Malachi McIntosh's debut collection of short stories offers surreal and satirical accounts of the many perils of contemporary life. From resistant mothers and unexpected corporate climbers, to doomed weddings and unwelcome visitors, these dark, comedic and uncanny stories contend with timeless concerns of parenthood, family, race and identity in the here and now.
Whether characters are absorbed in social media or burying their grief, raising themselves up or taking others down, Parables, Fables, Nightmares brings a light to our interactions in an ailing world and heralds the arrival of a unique new voice in fiction.

Malachi McIntosh's fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent, and Comma Press's Book of Birmingham. His stories have been long- and shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Galley Beggar Short Story Competition, Penguin Book's WriteNow and the Book Edit Writer's Prize, and commissioned by the National Trust and Lincoln University. Malachi is a recipient of a British Library Eccles Fellowship and a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award and was Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri from 2019-2022. He is currently an Associate Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford.