On 21st December 2017, the shortest day of the year, eighteen stories and twenty-eight poems celebrating DUSK were read live on twelve sites, from pubs to arts centres and libraries, by way of woodlands and hillsides, at DUSK: the 2017 Solstice Shorts Festival A wave of words across the UK.
Starting in Ellon in Aberdeenshire at 17:07, the festival raced over the country at the speed of dark, with overlapping events taking place in Inverness, Carlisle, Holyhead, Lancaster, Rossendale, Nottingham, Birmingham, Greenwich, Kelston, and Warkleigh, ending in Redruth in Cornwall as full dark fell at 18:20.

read a sample

This is the perfect, atmospheric memento of one of the most imaginative, forward-thinking festivals in recent history: a nation’s length celebration of the dying of the light at the turning point of winter. Patrick Gale

Dusk lends itself to the anxiety that darkness brings, and there is a fair smattering of edge-of-horror, chills-down-the-spine and keeping-the-lights-on, but there is also humour and the in-between-ness of the cusp of day, when anything is possible.