Milton Keynes has evolved from a cluster of Buckinghamshire villages and towns to a whole new city. In 2024, Lit Fest adopted Tales from the City as the theme for a flash fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry competition.

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How to interpret the brief is entirely up to entrants. You might draw inspiration from Peter Ackroyd’s famous biography of London, or from Armistead Maupin’s stories about the  people outside the mainstream of San Francisco among whom his ‘Tales of the City’ novels were set.

As the cliché runs, every city has a thousand stories – or, more accurately in our city's case, a quarter of a million individual stories. They may be tales of arrival, of birth, of transformation, of the emotional rollercoaster of human existence. And then there’s the stories of the city itself: you cannot have a history without the story that the word literally and metaphorically contains. And buildings, streets and landscapes have histories just as people – or animals or trees and plants – do.

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