2025 festival

At Blue Mountain Christian University, April 3-5, 2025

the competition

We are pleased to announce the winners of the SLF Undergraduate Writing Competition!

membership benefits

Join us for the 2025 Southern Literary Festival

Keynote Speaker

Please share!

Breakout Session

Don’t Fade on Me: on Writing & Publishing Novels

Presented by William Boyle

Friday, April 5
9-10:15 a.m.
Room 326

Photo: Katie Farrell Boyle

William Boyle

William Boyle is the author of eight works of fiction set in the southern Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; Death Don’t Have No Mercy, a story collection; Everything Is Broken, published initially in France and subsequently serialized in Southwest Review; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, winner of the Prix Transfuge du meilleur polar étranger in France and an Amazon Best Book of 2019; City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020; Shoot the Moonlight Out, listed by CrimeReads as one of the ten best noir novels of 2021 and nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 2023; and, coming in 2025, Saint of the Narrows Street. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.