Many congratulations to the 2019 winners in our 2019 Novella-in-Flash Award and also to the Highly Commended writers. First prize goes to UK based author, Ellie Walsh, for her novella-in-flash Birds with Horse Hearts. The two Runners-Up are Johanna Robinson, also from the UK for her novella-in-flash, Homing and John Brantingham from the US with his novella-in-flash Inland Empire Afternoon.
This year we are also pleased to be able to award three Highly Commended prizes to Francine Witte from the US for The Way of The Wind, Debra Daniel from the US for Roster and Dan Crawley from the US for Straight Down the Road.
We received 108 entries this year, nearly the same number as in 2018 and submissions came in from several different countries including the UK, Ireland, Spain, US, Australia and New Zealand. As our 2019 Judge, Michael Loveday, remarked in his report, the standard of entries was very high. And it has been exciting to read how different authors interpret the form. We love how the novella-in-flash allows for much experimentation, in the whole structure and within the individual flash fiction ‘chapters’. We received novellas in several different genres – science fiction based stories, stories showing life within a family or a relationship, historical stories, crime stories. Some covered large time spans, others focussed on events in a day, but all the long listed novellas had their unique ‘flash fiction’ take, making them very different from a ‘standard’ novella or short novel. The novella-in-flash is a form growing massively in popularity, with our inaugural winner How To Make A Window Snake , by Charmaine Wilkerson, winning the Saboteur Novella Prize in 2018 and recently, Sophie Van Llewyn’s novella-in-flash, Bottled Goods, published by Fairlight Press, being shortlisted for the Women’s Fiction Prize.
Having tested the water over the past two years and in light of these developments, we are very keen to further promote the form and to support our winners and commended writers by publishing the three winners each as a single book in both paperbook and digital copies. And we are also offering a similar publishing opportunity to our three Highly Commended Writers. These six novellas-in-flash are all fantastic reads and we believe they will encourage anyone interested in writing one, to have a go at the form.
We also hope, later down the line, to offer publication to the four other excellent novellas on our short list: Kremlin Quixote by David Rhymes from Spain; Off the Resting Sea by US based writer, Al Kratz; At the Bottom of the Stairs by UK author Chloe Banks, and George X by Peter Matthews, also from the UK.
Finally, we offer our huge thanks and appreciation to Michael Loveday, for all his work on judging our 2019 Award. He read and considered all the longlisted novellas very carefully, and has studied the shortlisted novellas even more closely. He is very enthusiastic about the novella-in-flash as a genre and keen on all its possibilities. It has been wonderful having him as our judge and we are very pleased to welcome him back to judge next year. The 2020 Award will open in April and end in mid January, 2020. More details posted soon.
Jude Higgins, BFFA founder,
