The judge for the 2022 short story competition, Nicholas Royle, is the author of seven novels, two novellas and three volumes of short fiction, and was at this year’s Faversham Literary Festival to talk about his latest work White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector. He has edited 20 anthologies of short stories. Reader in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as limited-edition chapbooks. He works as an editor for Salt Publishing.