Thank you to everyone who entered our 25th Award. We have been running three-times-a-year flash fiction contests for the past eight years. And there’s one extra one, from the first year we began,in 2015, when we just had the one Award.mOur love for flash fiction remains un-diminished and it is wonderful to receive entries from flash fiction fans from around the world. This time we received 1127 entries from 32 different countries:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States
We also enjoy writers getting excited over receiving ‘The Last Minute Club Badge’, this October’s pictured here. It’s given out to those who enter on the last day. But thank you also to everyone who entered at the beginning, the middle and the final weeks of this round, keeping our readers busy throughout.
It is always a difficult task to arrive at a longlist from hundreds of submissions. And I appreciate the dedicated work of our team of initial readers, who love the opportunity to read such a large variety of stories and help whittle down choices to the final fifty. Authors of those fifty stories have been offered publication in our 2023 anthology and we are currently in discussions about choosing a title for the anthology. We’ll be looking through all the story titles from this and the previous two rounds to find a suitable one.
Our heartfelt thanks also to judge, Sara Hills, who, in just over two weeks, read the longlist, selected a short list of twenty, the final five winners and made such interesting and insightful comments on them after reading and re-reading many times. Read her judge’s report here.
Big congtatulations to all the winners! Dawn Steffler from the USA won first prize with her story ‘Detente’, Mairead Robinson from the UK won second prize with ‘Butterfly Effect’, Sally Jubb from the UK won third prize with ‘Murmuration’ Barbara Diggs, who lives in France was highly commended for ‘The Burial of Mrs Charles D Jackson’ and Autumn Bettinger from the US was highly commended for ‘ Train to the Last Iceberg’ I have linked all these stories to the winners’ page where they are published and where you will soon be able to read the author bios. They are all fantastic pieces of flash fiction.
Our next award opens tomorrow, 1st November, and closes the first Sunday in February. It will be judged by, novelist, short story, flash fiction writer and writing teacher, Susmita Bhattacharya, from the UK. We have a judge’s interview with her coming soon. We look forward to reading your stories.
Jude Higgins October 31st, 2023.
