Whose voices are heard? Sarah Hall and Daisy Johnson provide a powerful answer in their new short story collections. In a lovely afternoon at the Manchester Literature Festival, I had the pleasure of seeing Hall and Johnson discuss folklore, the female body, AI, and the possibilities of short stories.
In Helm, Hall (winner of the BBC National Short Story Award) conjures a ferocious wind in the Eden Valley into a living witness of humanity. The Helm wind is worshipped, feared, and now under threat from human interference. It’s a story concerned with our enduring connection to the natural world, obsession, and climate change.
In The Hotel, Johnson (Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under) invites us into a gothic, mysterious building in the Fens. Women enter and emerge changed by the cursed land the hotel sits on. It is a stunningly atmospheric horror read which, as Alex Preston puts it, makes Johnson the ‘demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.’
Writing place
Interviewed by Naomi Frisby, Hall and Johnson exhibited a natural chemistry. Both authors found inspiration in natural settings close to their hearts. Helm is deeply rooted in the hills of Cumbria. Hall discussed finding a balance between the innate wildness of the wind and a traditional novel structure, ultimately deciding to lean into a natural flow – allowing characters to reappear without set threads linking the stories.
For Johnson, that essential sense of place is found once more in The Fens. Her first collection, Fen, was also set in this landscape. Johnson fondly recalled telling ghost stories to her siblings about the Fenlands, noting that her debut felt like a natural continuation of those local folktales.
The uncanny flatness of the South shaped The Hotel‘s setting, with Johnson recalling how eerie this space has always felt to her. She noted that having a Halloween birthday naturally drew her towards horror, citing The Exorcist (1973) as an inspiration for one of the novel’s tales.
Writing history
When asked how they approach writing history, both authors described a preference for immersing themselves in the history of their own created worlds. For Johnson, ancestral trauma haunts The Hotel. She felt it was important to write about the origins of the land before the hotel was built, finding that the true horror emanates from the ground itself.
The Helm wind possesses a unique sense of history. With the wind as her narrator, Hall was careful to differentiate human sensibilities from those of nature. Helm preserves fragments of humanity it finds interesting, maintaining a museum of trinkets: a Howdah pistol, an iron skullcap, and an Apple iPhone 11. Developing this voice provided a unique opportunity to assess humanity. Hall read a passage from Helm where the wind first encounters a human in a hot-air balloon and, in doing so, learns the word ‘balloon.’
This use of voice struck me as a charming exploration of the possibilities such a narrator offers. Throughout the talk, it became clear how carefully this voice had been nurtured. For Hall, this novel has been twenty years in the making. She admitted that her primary hurdle was trying to be a conventional writer. She noted that this is a “very interesting time for fiction because of the hybrid possibilities between short stories and the novel,” and that within this lies new possibilities. Both agreed they had to abandon the need to be conventional writers to create these works.
Johnson, by contrast, had a much more compressed timeline for The Hotel. The novel was commissioned for BBC Radio, and Johnson found herself influenced by the actors who would be narrating the stories. This faster pace helped her tighten the narratives, making The Hotel feel like a cohesive “tissue-papering, piling on of experiences.”
Writing women
Later, during the Q&A, the writers were asked how they keep their perspectives on women’s stories fresh. Both stated that writing about female experiences comes naturally to them. Hall resisted the notion that women’s stories have been “overdone” in contemporary literature. Insisting instead that women should draw upon their own experiences, as modern womanhood constantly generates new perspectives.
In Helm, Hall’s female characters are the ones who truly understand the wind. She reimagines the leader of a Neolithic tribe as a woman because, in her words, “Why not?” This leader, NaNay, faces intense scrutiny from her tribesmen yet demonstrates a profound connection to Helm and the Eden Valley. Similar narratives of underestimated women run throughout Helm. Applying a modern female perspective refreshes these historical depictions of womanhood.
AI & the Future of the Short Story
While acknowledging AI’s potential as a tool for writers, Hall expressed reservations about a future of entirely AI-generated literature and its implications for creatives. She imagined a vending machine where a patron could pay £3 for a personalised AI-generated novel – an idea that made the audience collectively shudder.
Frisby then directed our attention to a mark on the bottom-left corner of Helm: a small globe surrounded by the words ‘human-written.’ This badge reflects growing concerns in publishing about how writers will be remunerated in a world where AI can produce cheap mimicries of their work.
As the prospect of AI-generated books on our shelves seems increasingly inevitable, the Society of Authors is calling for:
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Required author consent before an AI system uses their work, in line with existing copyright law.
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Required transparency over data sources used to train AI systems.
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Clear labelling for published works that used AI in their production.
Hall’s ‘human-written’ mark is a welcome development in a world growing ever more uncertain for writers. Hopefully, it signals the start of a broader movement in publishing to address the impact of AI on creatives.
Manchester Literature Festival: In Review
As the first major event of this year’s Festival, Hall and Johnson will be a hard act to follow. The trio’s rapport made the talk feel less like a formal author-to-audience lecture and more like an intimate conversation. Hall and Johnson seek to push the boundaries of the short story in a way that I will carry with me in my own writing, and I (predictably) left with two new signed copies.
For more coverage of the 2025 Manchester Literature Festival, please see below:
