The April edition of BristolCon Fringe will be devoted to flash fiction. That means that we have not two, not three, but a whole eight readers for you.

Well, I say whole. We were going to have the fabulous Gareth L. Powell, but the poor guy is on crutches right now and he needs to be fit and ready for Eastercon so we have excused him his duties. Someone else will fling monkey poo on his behalf.

So the line-up we have is as follows:

Louise Gethin writes about love, death and anything in between. She self-published a collection of short stories, Anecdotes of Love and Death, in 2013 with the help of Andy Gibb (actually, it wouldn’t have happened without him). Otherwise, she has read at The Thunderbolt as part of the Word of Mouth Series and been included in a number of short story anthologies including: Unchained — published by Tangent Books in 2013, Hidden Bristol — published by Tangent Books in 2012. She has been a member of Bristol Writers Group for 11 years and was one of the four founding members.

Justin Newland is a regular attendee at Fringe and is doubtless well known to podcast listeners for being the person who helps Cheryl out by asking questions from the audience when no one else is willing to.

Jonathan Pinnock is the author of the novel Mrs. Darcy Versus The Aliens (Proxima, 2011), the Scott Prize-winning short story collection Dot Dash (Salt, 2012) and the forthcoming bio-historico-musicological-memoir thing Take It Cool (Two Ravens Press, 2014). He blogs at www.jonathanpinnock.com and tweets as @jonpinnock. He read at Fringe in February.

Pauline Masurel has been writing tiny stories for over twelve years now, which is long before most people were calling them flash fiction. Her short, and even shorter, stories have been published in anthologies, and online in both print and audio versions. Two of her short stories were broadcast on Radio 4. She is amply qualified to write flash fiction inspired by astronomy, because she used to live a couple of doors down from the Herschel Museum in Bath and she once watched Patrick Moore falling asleep at a public lecture. You can find out more about her work from her website.

Peter Sutton has lived in Bristol since the late 80’s, on and off, and now considers it his home. Like most authors he had a wide variety of jobs. Unlike most authors he only started writing post 40 after a lifetime of procrastination. He’s always had a passion for books and once tried unsuccessfully to have a publishing career, going so far to get a PGDip in publishing, but it didn’t take and he ended up working for the BBC instead in just one of those ‘any jobs’. He now works for a major telecoms company. He is one of the organisers of Bristol Festival of Literature and has had stories published on 1000 Words, storieswithpictures.org and Hodderscape. He is a contributor to the Naked Guide to Bristol and an event organiser for Vala publishing. You can follow him on Twitter at @suttope and read his blog at http://brsbkblog.blogspot.co.uk/.

Jonathan L. Howard is an author, game designer, and scriptwriter, creator of Johannes Cabal (a necromancer of some little infamy), and the YA SF series The Russalka Chronicles. He can be found on Twitter as @jonathanlhoward and at his site www.jonathanlhoward.com. He read at Fringe last November.

Kevlin Henney is the organizer of Bristol’s annual contribution to National Flash Fiction Day. His work has been published in a variety of venues, including New Scientist. He read at Fringe last December, and this event is All His Fault.

And finally, Cheryl Morgan is a publisher and literary critic who is absolutely terrified at the prospect of having to read her own fiction in public for the first time, especially in the company of such distinguished persons.

As always, BristolCon Fringe takes place at the Shakespeare Tavern in Prince Street (round the back of the Arnolfini). Readings start at 7:30. Full details are available from the BristolCon website.