Thank you very much to everyone who entered our second novella in flash fiction award. We received 111 entries, a few more than last year from fourteen different countries. The twenty six writers on the long list represent Austria, Australia, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Switzerland the UK and the US.
Our thanks also go to our judge Meg Pokrass, for judging the contest for the second year running. Meg is a long-time champion of the novella-in-flash genre,and her own novella, Here Where We Live and her essay on the form is contained in My Very End of The Universe, the field guide to the novella-in-flash published by Rose Metal Press. We really appreciate Meg’s careful reading of so many novellas and her excitement about the winners and so many of those that were listed.
It’s a difficult form to write and we appreciated the ways authors tackled writing in this genre, experimenting with many different structures and styles with all sorts of themes and subject matters. For the Award, entrants had to create a work of in between 6000 and 18,000 words, with individual flash fictions that could stand-alone but be understand as part of a whole. It takes time to create a piece that fits this criteria, but on social media and elsewhere writers who participated told us that it was one of the most enjoyable writing projects they’d ever undertaken. That is very gratifying for the Bath Flash Fiction team. The intention behind all our enterprises – the Novella-in-Flash Award, Ad Hoc Fiction, Bath Flash Fiction single-flash Award, our evenings of readings, book launches, author interviews, reviews and the Flash Fiction Festival – is to encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to write and read flash fiction. And to have fun – we’re big on fun.
We can only publish one anthology of the three winners with Ad Hoc Fiction but hope that novellas submitted for the Award, or the many fine individual flash fictions within them, will find other publishing homes. If you are coming to the Flash Fiction Festival in July, Jude Higgins and Meg Pokrass are running a workshop on the novella-in-flash, where we will focus on the different aspects of the form and we also hope to launch the anthology of winners at the Festival. Finally, our huge congratulations to the three winners – first prize winner Luke Whisnant from the United States and runners up, Victoria Melekian also from the United States and Jack Cottrell from New Zealand. We very much look forward to seeing their work in print later in the year.
