Number 9

by Vikram Kapur

The moment draws closer, the moment she has been waiting for, the moment when she will exact revenge on the man who killed her parents. She is Number 9; she is a suicide bomber, and she is pregnant. A stunning, tense short story from a writer shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

ABOUT SHORTFIRE

Number 9 is published by Shortfire Press, a new digital short story publisher specialising in stories from new and established authors, available to download one by one.



'Could we be in a place now where technology has brought us full circle? Where that which took us away from stories is now set to bring us back to them? "The short story is an essential art form again," says Nikesh Shukla (author of the Costa-shortlisted Coconut Unlimited).
If you are in any doubt, look no further than Shortfire Press, a new digital-only, short story publisher. Their ethos is you can read a short story in the time it takes to get to work, or while waiting for a friend in a bar, or in any of those spare moments you have during the day when you would normally consume the sugary fluff of the internet.' GUARDIAN

'The short story is in fashion. Events such as Literary Death Match, Shoreditch House Literary Salon and the Book Club Boutique are making short-form fiction funky.
Clare Hey, a former HarperCollins editor, hopes to capitalise on this energy this month by launching a service which some will see as an iTunes for the written word.' INDEPENDENT

12 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 7, 2011

About the author

Vikram Kapur is a writer from New Delhi. Sometime in his mid-twenties the poetry of William Butler Yeats rocked his world. While his initial ambition of becoming a poet in the tradition of Yeats quickly waned, the writing bug did not. For several years he attempted to snuff out the bug by casting himself in the role of the typical Indian middle-class male. Holding on to a steady job and living a routine life while clamping down hard on literary ambition each time it reared its head. By his mid-thirties, however, he could fight the bug no longer. One day he simply put pen to paper and wrote a passage that became the beginning of his first novel Time Is a Fire.

Since then, Vikram has published another novel The Wages of Life and an edited anthology on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India called 1984: In Memory and Imagination. He has also published short fiction and nonfiction in anthologies, newspapers and several literary publications around the world. His short fiction has been broadcast internationally on radio and shortlisted in a number of international short story competitions including, among others, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. More information is available on his website.

Vikram has a PhD in creative and critical writing from the University of East Anglia where he substantially raised the average age of his graduating class as a forty-something student. When he is not writing, he is an associate professor of English at Shiv Nadar University near New Delhi.