We love the results of the June Award coming a couple of weeks before the Flash Fiction Festival where so many flash fiction fans gather to celebrate the short-short form. For this round we received 984 entries from the following 35 countries:

Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

Thank you again to everyone for entering. It is such a thrill to read so many diverse stories. Again, we supplied our fun virtual Last Minute Club badge for the final day entrants. But of course we appreciate everyone who enters at anytime during the four months of the competition.

Thank you too for the reading team who read throughout the four months and live and breathe flash fictions in the last busy few weeks of the competition, for taking on the hard job of filtering through so many great pieces in a short time span to reach a varied and wonderful longlist of stories to send to our judge Michelle Elvy. Mostly everyone listed has written back to say they would like to be published and we are looking forward to seeing them all together in print along with stories from the other two rounds.

Michelle has written a great report and comments on all the winning stories and our big thanks to her too for completing the task of short listing and choosing the five winners in a short time span. Just three weeks from the end of the Award to the results announcements today. This time round we have writers from the UK and the US.

Sara Hills an American writer based in the UK, who won also second prize with her story Failure to Thrive in June 2023 and was highly commended in Feburary 2021 with Always Down a Dirt Road I am Walking and in October 2022 with A Beachcombers Guide to Desert Grief, now wins first prize with another brilliant story, A Cock Among the Bathers Emily Rinkema from the US wins second prize with ‘Driving my Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab’, Catherine Ogston from the UK wins third prize with ‘On Friday Nights in May I Sit Quietly with a Friend’, Ronald Jones from the UK is highly commended with ‘The Bee’, and RJ Dwyer from the UK is highly commended with ‘Prognois’. All marvellously inventive stories with so much conveyed in 300 words or under.

Our next Award, the 28th one, begins on July 1st and ends, Sunday October 6th. The judge this time round is Matt Kendrick, UK based writer, editor and writing tutor.