Read about our winners and highly commended writers and go to our judge Michael Loveday’s report to see his comments on their wonderful novellas-in-flash. All six novellas-in-flash will be published in separate single author books by our small press, Ad Hoc Fiction and will be available to buy in paperback on the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop and in ebook formats on Kindle and Nook in due course. We are thrilled to publish such a brilliant variety flash fiction novellas by these authors and to further support a form of flash fiction growing so much in popularity worldwide.
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Winner, Ellie Walsh, with Birds with Horse Hearts. Ellie is a PhD student at the University of Plymouth, where her research focuses on Nepalese feminist literature. She has short stories and poetry published in UK, Canadian and Indian journals, and her play was produced in London. Ellie spends much of her time in Chitwan, Nepal, where the villagers teach her how to farm rice and often tell her to lighten up.

Runner-up, Johanna Robinson, with Homing. Originally from the northwest of England, Johanna spent most of her adult life in Leeds, returning with her family to the Liverpool region in 2011. At university in she took part in the Erasmus scheme, living and studying in Oslo, Norway, in the era before mobile phones. Johanna began to write short fiction in 2016 on the Liverpool Comma Press 2016 short story course, and her work can be found in Strix, Ellipsis Zine, the Brighton Prize anthology and Reflex Fiction, and she has been shortlisted for the Dinesh Allirajah Prize 2019. She is also currently working on a novel.

Runner-up John Brantingham with Inland Empire Afternoon. John is Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park’s first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and Best Small Fictions 2016. He has ten books of poetry and fiction including The L.A. Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press) and A Sublime and Tragic Dance (Cholla Needles Press) and California Continuum: Migrations and Amalgamations (Pelekinesis Press). He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College and lives in the Inland Empire.

Highly commended, Francine Witte, with The Way Of The Wind. Francine is a poet, flash fiction writer, and playwright. Her flash fiction chapbook, Cold June, was the 2010 winner of the Thomas Wilhelmus prize, selected by Robert Olen Butler. Two of her flash fictions were published in the 2018 Norton anthology, New Micro. Her second poetry collection The Theory of Flesh is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in November, 2019. Her verse-play, Love is a Bad Neighborhood, recently had a successful off-broadway run in NYC. She is the editor of the Facebook flash fiction blog, Flash Boulevard. She lives in New York City. Follow her on twitter @francinewitte.

Highly commended, Dan Crawley, with Straight Down The Road. Dan Crawley’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Wigleaf, New Flash Fiction Review, Atticus Review, New World Writing, Bending Genres, and North American Review. He is a recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts creative writing fellowship and a Best Small Fictions nominee. Along with teaching creative writing workshops and literature courses, he is a fiction reader for Little Patuxent Review. Find him at https://twitter.com/danbillyc.

Highly commended, Debra A. Daniel, with Roster. Debra A. Daniel, (Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher, Muddy Ford Press, poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August, Finishing Line Press, and As Is, Main Street Rag), is a Pushcart nominee and has won awards in fiction from The Los Angeles Review, Bacopa, the SC Fiction Project, and was twice named SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellow, won the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, as well as awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has appeared in journals and anthologies including: The Los Angeles Review, Fall Lines, Smokelong Quarterly, Kakalak, Emrys Journal, Pequin, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, Gargoyle.