Yearly Archives: 2024

February 2024 Long List

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award long list and huge thanks to all who entered.

Author names are yet to be announced, so while it is fine to share that you are on the long list, we do ask that you do not identify yourself with your particular fiction at this stage.

Important
We receive many many entries, and occasionally some entries have the same title. We are in the process of sending an offer of publication email to all authors on the long list. Please do not assume you are on the long list unless you have received that publication offer. If in doubt, contact us.

Read in Full

February 2024 Last Minute Club Badge!

The Last Minute Club is open! Our 26th Award closes today, Sunday 4th February at midnight. Prizes £1000 first, £300 second, £100 third prize £30 for two runners up. One entry £9.00. Two entries £15.00, Three entries £18.00. Anthology publication offer for all fifty longlisted in our 2024 BFFA Anthology. Up to 300 words. Judge Susmita Bhattacharya from the Uk. Read her judge’s interview here. Results out by end of Feb. Enter here.

Here is the last minute club badge that John at Ad Hoc Fiction created again for the 26th Award. Green and pale brown Anyone entering today should get one with their entry confirmation.

Read in Full

Last MInute Club Badges. Coming soon!

Thanks again to all flash fiction writers, for your support for our Bath Flash Fiction Awards. Our readers are very busy reading your entries for the 26th Award which closes this Sunday 4th February at midnight GMT. For up to 300 word flash fiction. Entry costs: £9.00 one entry £15 two entries £18 three entries. Prizes £1000 first prize, £300 second prize, £100 third prize, £30 each for two runners up. All fifty longlisted stories are offered publication in our 2024 print anthology and posted world wide. Top stories are always nominated for Best Small Fictions The Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize.This round is being judged by award winning writer Susmita Bhattacharya

To remind everyone, The Last Minute Club, for intrepid flash fictioneers is only open on the final day. Anyone entering on Sunday 4th February will receive a (virtual) Last Minute Club badge. Everyone loves badges don’t they? Our mini-competition to guess the colour of the badge is open on X and Facebook tomorrow, Saturday 3rd Feb. The first person to guess the colour (or colour comibation of the new badge will receive either one of the 2023 Bath Flash Fiction anthologies Vol 8. Or the new Flash Fiction Festival Anthology. We often give prizes to two people for near guesses. You won’t know the colour until first thing on Sunday morning. Read in Full

Flash Fiction Festival Weekend, 12-14 July in Bristol UK. Booking Open!

A busy week! It’s the final weekend to enter our 26th Award judged by Susmita Bhattacharyya. The deadline is midnight GMT, Sunday 4th February. Results out on 29th Feburary. All fifty on the longlist will be offered publication in our eighth anthology. Copies posted worldwide.
Double and triple entries reduced. £1460 in prizes.

And for more excitement, booking for the packages at the seventh flash fiction festival we’ve sponsored, 12th -14th July, in Bristol UK is now open.

There are four different flash fiction festival booking options, two for a place with accommodation and meals, one for a place with meals but no accommodation and one for a place only. There are 29 fantastic workshops and panels by presenters from the UK the USA, Canada Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Ireland to choose from in seven different slots during Saturday and Sunday. And there are readings, book launches on Friday and Saturday nights, a book shop, a bar with karaoke and plenty of space to socialise in the beautiful grounds of Trinity College! On the flash fiction festival site, check out the gallery of pictures from 2023 to get a sense of the atmosphere Read in Full

Using Tarot to Inspire Flash: Anna M Wang

Prodigal

Ad Hoc fiction

She’s recently begun organising a community project on the subject of Tarot Cards, and is eager to showcase a variety of voices and styles. Read in Full

Eight BFFA Anthologies Published since 2016!

Two weeks to go until the deadline our 26th Award on Sunday February 4th. (Judge Susmita Bhattacharya) and the first chance to be offered pubication in our 2024, anthology, the ninth one in the series. Fifty longlisted authors are offered publication in each round of the award. Feb, June and October and then the book is compiled.

We’ve published nearly 900 stories since the first volume was published. Cover images and links to picture galleries of all eight anthologies are below with links to pictures of the books when they arrived with the authors, or to book launches and interviews.

Our eighth anthology from the 2023 Awards The Weather Where You Are is still on its way to some people and we’ll post a gallery up soon!

Vol One: To Carry Her Home, title story by Christopher Allen

Vol Two, The Lobsters Run Free, Title story by Anna Geary Meyer

Vol Three: Things Lost and Found by The Side of The Road, title story by Jo Gatford

Vol Four With One Eye on the Cows, title story by Annette Edwards-Hill

Vol five Restore to Factory Settings, title story by J A Keogh

Vol Six, Snow Crow, title story by Doug Ramspeck

Vol Seven Dandelion Years, title story by Joanki Ray

Vol Eight The Weather Where You Are, title story by William Davidson

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25 BFFA 1st prize stories 2016-2023

There’s just under three weeks left before Sunday February 4th, the deadline of our 25th Award judged by UK based writer, Susmita Bhattacharya, and I’m reposting a list I made a couple of years ago of all our first prize wins, linked to judge’s comments and author interviews and put into categories of subject matter and theme. There are four more first prize wins now. One other thing to consider if you read the stories — our Award word limit is 300 words but we welcome very short micros too. This might be of interest to those who recently subbed 100 word pieces for the Welkin prize. One of our first prize winners, Tying the Boats by Amanda 0’Callaghan from 2017 is just 180 words long. Read in Full

Novella in Flash 2024 Results

Huge congratulations to the winners and highly commended writers in our 2024 Novella in Flash Award, selected by John Brantingham. Read their bios below.

Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing, Hereafter the first prize novella by US based writer, Sarah Freligh and the runner-up novellas, Nose Ornaments by Sudha Balagopal from the US and Marilyn’s Ghost by Jo Withers,from Australia.

Best wishes to our two highly commended authors, Jupiter Jones and Thomas McColl, and the shortlisted and longlisted writers for future publication of their novellas. And good luck to everyone who entered. It was a privilege to read your work. What a wonderful array of novellas!

You can read John Brantingham’s comments on the three winners and the two highly commended in his judge’s report and his general comments in his report and also his reading notes from when the short list was announced. We really appreciate his careful work over the past few months.

First prize winner:
Hereafter by Sarah Freligh

Sarah Freligh is the author of six books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and A Brief Natural History of Women, published in 2023 by Harbor Editions, and Dear You, Alien Buddha, August 2023. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sun Magazine, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22) and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Runner-up
Nose Ornaments by Sudha Balagopal

Sudha Balagopal’s fiction straddles continents and cultures, blending thoughts and ideas from the east and the west. She is honored to have her writing in many fine journals including The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, CRAFT, The Maine Review and Bureau Dispatch. Her highly- commended novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc fiction in 2021. She has stories included in Best Small Fictions, 2022 and 2023. When she’s not writing, she teaches yoga. Find her on Twitter @authorsudha or at www.sudhabalagopal.com

Runner-up
Marilyn’s Ghost by Jo Withers

Jo Withers spent the first thirty-five years of her life in Northern England before moving to South Australia in 2008 where she now resides with her husband, children and a motley crew of elderly pets.She works in her local kindergarten and finds the children’s quirky comments are a constant source of inspiration for her ‘world off-kilter’ brand of fiction.Jo has previously won prizes at The Caterpillar, Reflex Press, FlashBack Fiction, Furious Fiction, Retreat West, Molotov Cocktail and SmokeLong. Her work has featured in Best Microfictions 2020 and Wigleaf Top 50 2021. She has also been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize.

Highly Commended
Nine Inches of Rain by Jupiter Jones

Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the author of three novellas-in-flash, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker, Lovelace Flats, and Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell. Being a proper nerd with very little social life, she is currently working on a PhD on the role of (dis)connectivity in the novella-in-flash. https://jupiter-jones.com/
@jupiterjonz

Highly Commended
The Man With the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face by Thomas McColl
Thomas McColl lives in London and works as a Procedural Publisher at the House of Commons. He’s had two collections of poetry published – Being With Me Will Help You Learn (Listen Softly London Press, 2016) and Grenade Genie (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020) – and his short stories and poems have been published in magazines such as Fictive Dream, Bare Fiction, Here Comes Everyone and Smoke: A London Peculiar, and featured on BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM and TV’s London Live.

John Brantingham’s report on Novella in Flash 2024

Thanks very much to John Brantingham for judging our 2024 Award, and for his encouraging general comments as well as the specific remarks about the winners listed below. John is a big fan of the novella in flash, having also written several himself and we absolutely agree that all these novellas should be out in the world.

You can also read John’s previous comments on the longlist and short list and read more about the winners and commended below. As stated in our Award details, Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing the top three this year Hereafter,the first prize winner and the runners up, Nose Ornaments and Marilyn’s Ghost.

John writes:

I am thrilled with all of the novellas-in-flash in this year’s contest. Each of these had diverse subject matter, styles, and approaches to fiction writing, but I loved that each of them used the novella-in-flash form to help distill what they were saying about the world. In addition to this one unifying element, they also all dealt with those most powerful moments of the human experience. They dealt with issues like breaking with the past as one moves on into the future, how to negotiate life in a small town, grief and loss, thoughts of suicide, and the way society constructs and deconstructs fame.
As with last year, I would encourage any of the writers whose work I read to find a publisher for their work. These were all interesting and innovative, and the decision for the final choice is to some degree subjective. I can say that I loved reading all of them. I would have bought them had they been on a shelf in a bookstore.

Highly Commended
The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face
The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face is a fascinating novella about a man who discusses the endless abuse and self-harm of toxic masculinity and staying closeted that leads to self-harm. This work contains an interesting intrusive narrator who not only presents the story but also provides commentary on what was happening and the greater meaning of it all in terms of how the main character views the world and is handled by the world. He still keeps us at a bit of a psychic distance, which is the perfect place to keep up because otherwise it would turn pedantic. It is not just a strong novella-in-flash, but the stand-alone stories have self-contained emotional catharses that are moving in their own right.

Highly Commended
Nine Inches of Rain
Nine Inches of Rain is a historical novella-in-flash set in August of 1952 when a storm ravages a small town. Aside from any other considerations, the story of how a group of people deal with and live through natural chaos is compelling. The characters and their reactions are human and telling. However, Nine Inches of Rain uses the novella-in-flash form to explore what life in 1952 in the United Kingdom outside of London was like. It looks at the values and interpersonal relationships of the people in this world.

Runner Up
Nose Ornaments
Nose Ornaments follows the lives of three generations of Indian women as they migrate from India to Arizona. It looks at the Indian diaspora during a time of quickly shifting norms for women, and each generation finds that it needs to break free from the traditions of the previous generation. By using multiple generations, the author is able to bring humanity not only to the women as they free themselves from social norms, but also to show how disconcerting it is for a person of the previous generation to watch as her daughter acts in a way that doesn’t make sense to the mother.

Runner Up
Marilyn’s Ghost
Marilyn’s Ghost is a fictionalized account of the death and days following Marilyn Monroe’s death. It is a discussion not only of the characters in the story but also the social mores that surrounded the icon and our understanding of her. The shifting point-of-view helps us to understand who she was and how people projected their fantasies upon her. Just as important is a shifting style and approach to narrative. The author uses as many different ways of storytelling as possible in this short novella-in-flash. Each of them helps us to understand a different aspect of what the writer is suggesting about Monroe and our understanding of her.

Winner
Hereafter
Hereafter is a powerful novella-in-flash about the nature of grief. A woman loses her child when he’s young. There is no one there for her and those people who should be part of her support system, mother and partner and others, are either missing from her life or so critical of it and her that she might as well be alone. So she has to find a way to live and survive without the help of others. Hereafter is also a discussion of what it is for a woman to grow and feel invisible in a culture obsessed with sexualizing youth. What stands out as one of its achievements of Hereafter is the way that the main character doesn’t experience grief in a linear fashion or predictably. Years later, she’ll be reminded of what she lost and will be drawn into the pain in unexpected ways depicting the way that grief functions in a realistic way.

BFFA Anthology, Volume 8 -The Weather Where You Are

We’re very excited that the eighth BFFA anthology of stories by winners, shortlisted and longlisted writers from the three 2023 Awards is back from the printers. The title, ‘The Weather Where You Are’ is the title of a story by William Davidson, a piece shortlisted in the February 2023 Award and it is the final story in the anthology. Big thanks to William for letting us use it. William also won first prize in the June Award for ‘Remembered Yellow’, the second story in the book. We love this title for its many resonances. The cover, which we also love, is designed by John at Ad Hoc Fiction and uses an image from an 1870s weather map showing a storm. Very fitting currently, when storms have been sweeping across many countries in recent weeks. We hope the authors will share pictures of the weather where they are, on social media, when they receive their books. It will be so interesting to see what is happening around the world.

Contributor copies have been posted to most authors and should be arriving soon in the UK. We hope they won’t take long to reach authors in other countries, which include USA, Ireland, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Taiwan, Spain, India, Italy.

There are 134 stories of 300 words or less in the book. It will be published on our bookshop at Ad Hoc Fiction shortly and on Amazon in paperback soon afterwards. Time to buy and read and get inspiration for our first Award of 2024, judged by Susmita Bhattacharya which closes in just over one month (February 4th). All 50 longlisted authors from this Award and the two others in 2024 will be offered publication in our ninth volume of stories, out at the end of the year or early 2025.

Thank you to everyone who entered in 2023 and supprted our ventures We received 3345 entries from 45 different countries. Looking forward to many more wonderful stories this year.