Joshua Lobb is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong. His award-winning short stories have appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Bridport Anthology, Southerly, Text, and Animal Studies Journal. In 2014 he won the LitLink Unpublished Manuscript Award, awarded by the Byron Writers Festival and the Varuna Writers' House.

'Lobb’s writing is at many points sparse and straightforward, and at others more pungent and poetic, but underpinning the various virtuoso treatments of the material is an inch-perfect gauge of the weight of how a story unfolds in its telling.'

• What he heardSix stories about birds, with seven questionsCall and responseFlockingDo you speak my language?Further to flyThe pecking orderNocturneMagpiesAnd no birds singAves admittantThe flight of birdsField notesAcknowledgementsWorks cited

Joshua Lobb is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong. His award-winning short stories have appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Bridport Anthology, Southerly, Text, and Animal Studies Journal. In 2014 he won the LitLink Unpublished Manuscript Award, awarded by the Byron Writers Festival and the Varuna Writers' House.

'Lobb’s writing is at many points sparse and straightforward, and at others more pungent and poetic, but underpinning the various virtuoso treatments of the material is an inch-perfect gauge of the weight of how a story unfolds in its telling.'

• What he heardSix stories about birds, with seven questionsCall and responseFlockingDo you speak my language?Further to flyThe pecking orderNocturneMagpiesAnd no birds singAves admittantThe flight of birdsField notesAcknowledgementsWorks cited