Smorgasbord
WHAT DO WE OWE THE STRANGER? WHAT DO WE OWE THE DEAD?
A Japanese man paints a second eye on a doll. A widow holds an injured gull to her chest and cries by the sea. A grieving child climbs a stack of pallets to send a lantern into the sky. A chess player forfeits a game he was winning. A man places three red tulips on a grave.
Marc Joan’s critically acclaimed short fiction spans Geneva and San Francisco, Cornwall and Cambridge, Wales and India, the very old and the not-so-old – and the distances between the people who live in them.
Written with delicacy and the occasional dark twist, Smorgasbord is about what we carry across borders – grief, memory, guilt, old age – and what we leave behind.
Marc Joan
Marc Joan, a biomedical scientist, was raised in South India and now lives in England. He has published ~25 stories in anthologies and magazines including Nightscript, Weird Horror, Lighthouse Literary Journal, Structo and Smokelong Quarterly. Competition results include: 2017/2018 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (finalist); 2017/18 Ink Tears Short Story Competition (runner up); 2017/18 Galley Beggar Short Story Competition (special mention); 2017 Brighton Prize (long-listed); 2018 BBC National Short Story Award (last 60 from ~1,000 entries); 2020 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize (top 4%); 2020 Punt Volat / Spencer Parker Memorial Award (winner); 2020 William van Dyke Short Story Prize (long-listed); 2020 Gatehouse Press New Fiction Award (Highly Commended); 2020/21 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (finalist); 2021 Short Fiction / University of Essex International Short Story Competition (one of seven short-listed from ~780 entries); 2021 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize (long-longlist).
