Adam Marek

The New Uncanny book from Comma Press has just won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology.

The collection contains my story Tamagotchi, alongside stories by Alison MacLeod, AS Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle and Etgar Keret, among others.

The awards are given each year for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic, in recognition of one of America’s greatest writers and the author of the classic short story ‘The Lottery’.

Editors Ra Page and Sarah Eyre asked 14 contemporary writers to read Freud’s 1919 essay on The Uncanny and respond to it with a short story. Even though Freud’s essay is 90 years old and like wading through treacle in parts, it has inspired some great stories. This is an exciting collection, and I’m really proud to be a part of it. Congratulations to all the other contributors, and well done Comma Press!

I have a day job as an editor, and I’m lucky enough to work in the middle of a nature reserve. We get all kinds of wildlife around the office, and sometimes in it. A couple of years ago we had a baby grass snake under one of the desks. On sunny days, lizards bask beside the footpaths. On a lunchtime walk, I once saw an adult grass snake swim across a pond, grab a frog and scoff it whole.

This week, a peacock came to the window. It strutted on the sill for a bit, then sat down and fell asleep. Peacocks are way too beautiful, except for their eyelids, which are scaly and weird and close from the bottom up. The expression they pull when they fall asleep reminds me of the Samiad from Five Children and It.

I got drenched running from Bethnall Green tube station to the Broadway Bookshop in Hackney, arrived an hour early for the event, and sat dripping into a plate of quinoa and falafel, earwigging a conversation between two guys who wondered whether the waiter was omniscient or omnipresent (I think surly would have been a more appropriate adjective).

The event was organised by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone. I read a new short story called If dead fish could blink, which was commissioned for Sheffield Hallam’s annual anthology Matter – out later this year ( it will also feature a new story from Alison MacLeod, and a foreword by Maggie Gee).

Colleen Becker and Melissa Bailey read from novels in progress, which both sounded exciting, and Richard Tyrone Jones read one of the funniest shorts I’ve ever heard - The day everyone in the world’s arseholes disappeared.

I got back to Kings Cross station early and went for a wander round St Pancras – I love St Pancras station. Everything there is so shiny it’s like walking five minutes into the future. I hope though that in the real future, it will be possible to find a pint of Guinness at 11pm, which it wasn’t on Tuesday. I had a chocolate shake instead. In the train on the way home, a girl was singing the opening fanfare of the lion king, just the first four seconds, over and over again. Hakuna Matata.

I’m reading a new short story at the Broadway Bookshop in London on Tuesday 7 July at 7pm, along with Colleen Becker, Richard Tyrone Jones and Melissa Bailey.