April’s StokerCon was cancelled — but not here at Eating the Fantastic. That’s because I’m on a mission to reclaim all of 2020’s convention conversations lost to COVID-19. I’ve already shared with you three “might have been” chats which would have taken place in New Zealand during Worldcon — with Lee Murray, Stephen Dedman, and Farah Mendlesohn — and now it’s time to head to Scarborough for lunch — or is it dinner? — with Priya Sharma.

Priya Sharma has published fiction in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark, and other venues. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. “Ormeshadow,” her first novella, won a Shirley Jackson Award. All the Fabulous Beasts, a collection of some of her work, won both the Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. She’s also a Grand Judge for the Aeon Award, an annual writing competition run by Albedo One, Ireland’s magazine of the Fantastic.

We discussed the best decision she made about her debut short story collection All the Fabulous Beasts, how the cover to that book conveys a different message in our COVID-19 world, why we each destroyed much of our early writing, a surprising revelation about the changed ending to one of her stories, who told her as a child “your soul is cracked,” the two of us being both longhand writers and defenders of ambiguity, what it’s like writing (and not writing) for theme anthologies, the most difficult story for her to write, how the pandemic has affected our writing, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)