Thank you again to all who entered our 19th Award and sent in stories from around the world. We appreciate your support very much and greatly enjoyed reading the huge variety of stories we received. This time, 1212 flash fictions from 44 countries, listed below. It’s wonderful to know there are flash fiction writers in all these different places.

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, Zambia

We had a purple Last Minute Club badge this time. and a book prize for the person who guessed the colour in advance. Three writers, Martha Lane, Sherri Turner and Alison Wassell, guessed shades of purple close to the colour of this badge, so they all received a copy of a Bath Flash Anthology. We like to make things fun! As always, many writers entered on the last day and received a badge. And our reading team were very busy during the last weeks in particular. Thanks very much to them for their dedication and love of flash fiction. So many great stories to choose from and as always many were vying for a place on longlist of 50 stories.

Our big thanks also to Sharon Telfer our 19th Award judge for the challenging task of choosing the short list of twenty stories, the three winners and two commended stories. Please do read her report, where she gives a wonderful account of the process of choosing them and excellent comments on all the winners. Many congratulations to all. You can read the winning stories on our winners’ page : Snow Crow, the first prize winning story by Doug Ramspeck from the USA; second prize for The Mothers by Jo Gatford from the UK. (Jo also won first prize in our February 2018 Award). Third prize for That’s All There is, There Ain’t No More’ from Tim Craig from the UK. (Tim has also won third prize twice before in February this year and in June 2018 and has also been commended in June 2019). Our two highly commended writers are Audrey Niven for her story On Rannoch Moor and Chloe Banks for her story ‘If Everyone Was A Superhero’.

Our 6th anthology containing longlisted, shortlisted and winning stories from all three rounds of the 2021 Bath Flash Fiction Awards will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction by the end of the year. Always exciting to know what the title will be, we don’t know yet!

The 20th Award will be open tomorrow, November 1st and will close in early February. We are delighted that award winning, UK based writer, Karen Jones is judging for us and we will be posting an interview with her tomorrow.

Jude Higgins
October 31st 2021