Jess Shannon.

Jess is a writer from Birmingham and proud graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme. She completed her MA in Writing in 2021.

Her fiction tends to orbit the irreverent and the surreal – she’s especially interested in the subjectivity of humour and the absurd and how this intersects with micro-plot structure. She’s also interested in how technology impacts concentration in the modern reader: how do you stimulate a reader in the age of endless stimulation? Her first novel deals with this question through form, in what she would affectionately term ‘hyperfiction’. She also spends much of her writing life harvesting stylistic cues from books she likes and converting them into something new. Her first novel was engendered out of an obsession with a cult South American novel she simply couldn’t stop reading. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overarching thematic imprint of her first novel is romantic/artistic obsession.

As well as fiction, Jess is an avid theatre goer and performer. She spends a lot of time at The Crescent Theatre in Birmingham working on productions both onstage and behind the scenes. She’s currently working as an English teacher.