The Solstice Shorts Festival celebrates the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year with time themed stories poems and songs. 2017 saw the festival go UK wide, with 12 sites taking part at DUSK, in a wave of words across the UK from Ellon in Aberdeenshire to Redruth in Cornwall. These are the chosen stories and poems from the festival.

Cherry Potts is the Director of Arachne Press, for whom she is editor of almost all our anthologies and runs the Annual Solstice Shorts Festival. Cherry is the author of an epic fantasy novel, two collections of short stories, a photographic diary of a community opera, and has had many stories in anthologies, magazines and online. Her novel of sibling hatred in the 1920s, The Bog Mermaid, won the Quill LGBTQ+ Prose prize 2022.