When Jude asked me to judge the 19th round of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, it got me thinking about why I like writing for competitions. How it helps my creative process, that is, setting aside any distant prospect of prizes and glory (welcome as those are, should they ever come). For me, it’s the disciplines of wordcount and deadline coupled with the challenge that safe won’t cut it. If your story is going to stand out from so very many other excellent, unseen pieces, you need to step out onto the high wire.
On the longlist I found stories that all took that risk. There were dreamscapes and dystopias, unheard perspectives and hidden inner dialogues, reworked fairy-tales and school play rebellions, the unexpected significance of custard, an earthquake on the page.
I read and reread these stories. I scribbled notes and added exclamation marks. I shuffled the order and read them in different rooms and in my local park. All the stories on the longlist would find applauded homes in magazines. There were some that it was so hard not to move across to the shortlist pile; there were ones on the shortlist that it felt so harsh not to give some kind of rosette. I considered making some Honourable Mentions here but, in all honesty, there would be too many. Read in Full
We’re very happy at 
We’ve summarised some information about the five anthologies published since the first Bath Flash Fiction Award opened early in 2015.For those who remember, we had a different way of running the competition back then. We didn’t close the inaugural Award until we reached 1000 entries. Ambitous! This took a long time. The inaugural Award announcement was in October, 2015. We hadn’t thought of producing an anthology at that early stage. 
One of our goals at Bath Flash Fiction is to promote the reading and writing of flash fiction. In past years, we’ve sponsored, along with Ad Hoc Fiction, the face-to-face flash fiction festivals in Bath and Bristol. This year, our founder, Jude Higgins, organised The Great festival Flash Off, a fun series of festival days running from March 2021 to August 2021. This was a very popular series, with great workshops, talks, readings and contests and because it was online, it was accessible to a world wide audience. The final prize from this first series – 
To take us through the winter beginning with a day on October 30th, we’re sponsoring, 
Come to this joint launch on Zoom, hosted by 
Both these novellas were 
This Sunday, 15th August is the last day to buy discounted entries for our 19th Award to be submitted by the deadline of 10th October. To get some inspiration for your own writing, read what poet, prose writer and artist, Dara Yen Elerath has to say about her first prize winning story 
Ad Hoc Fiction, our short short fiction press, published