Eloise Writes as the World Burns
by Erin Bondo
As rockets fall like rain on the southern counties – it is safe, for now, in the North – she drops a bomb on the fictional McElroy farmhouse. A necessary evil, they said. She strikes necessary from the page. It is too early for line edits, but evil is evil, she thinks, as the timbers crack and give.
*
When she wants to scream, she puts them on the lips of Mae MacEwan, who screamed as the soldiers ripped her son from her arms. But she must give these screams to the present, for this is where her own grief keens, day after night after day. Mae MacEwan is screaming as her world rends in two.
*
The radio sputters with news of renewed ground activity and she tears down the walls of Avignon, as if she can force the onslaught away, rake the invading troops eastward across the war room table with her words. She wonders if they are using paper maps now that the grid is compromised, because then they are not so different: both playing God on paper.
*
At the Episcopal church two streets over, the congregation is mid-recitation when an unnamed antagonist firebombs the nave. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. As the flames consume the altar, she plucks the Browns’ youngest from her pew – she cannot bear the girl’s burning flesh on the page. She sends more ambulances, more fire brigades, more volunteers, but the city still burns and burns.
*
Each night, she gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys – hides them in cramped cellars and heaving underground stations, hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence. If they make it through the night, so do we. She repeats it like a mantra until she is written in past tense.
About the Author
Erin Bondo grew up in rural Ontario, Canada on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabek and now lives in Scotland. She has been longlisted for the Welkin Mini prize and has work forthcoming in the BFFA and Flash Fiction Festival anthologies. Find her on Bluesky @erinbondo.com
29th Award Round-Up
This round we received 1068 submissions in the Award, submitted from the countries listed below. A big thank you to everyone who entered. We appreciate the early birds, the middle way and the ones who enter last minute and, as a bit of fun, get our Last Minute Club Badge. We often see new places in the world on this list and it is exciting to think that people are writing such inventive tiny tales the world over and sending them in.
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States
We loved the inventiveness of the stories entered. There were so many interesting angles on people’s lives, their fears, their mistakes, their emotional reslience or overwhelm. The stories made our readers cry, feel a deep sense of recognition, laugh, hold their breath and wonder.
A further big thanks to award winning prose and poetry writer and teacher, Sarah Freligh for reading and selecting the short list and the winners in our quick turn-around time. You can read her report here with its excellent observations and comments here.
This time first prize went to UK based Sara Hills ‘Like Dynamite’. This is Sara Hills’ second first prize win with us and she joins two others (William Davidson and Sharon Telfer) who have also won twice.
Second prize was awarded to Dawn Miller from Canada, for her story ‘Pack’.
Third prize to Erin Bondo from the UK for her story ‘Eloise Writes as the World Burns’.
Jay Mckenzie, a British writer currently residing in Korea, was highly commended for her story ‘Forgive me Martha’
and Tiffany Harris, from the US was highly commended for ‘How to Fold a World Map’.
All five stories are brilliant .
Huge congratulations to all! We’re looking forward to printing these winners, and all those from the long and short lists who have accepted publication,in our 2025 anthology,
Our 30th Award, judged by award=winning writer, editor and teacher, Marie Gethins from Ireland, opens Saturday March 1st, and ends on Sunday 8th June. Read Marie’s interview with Jude here. We look forward to reading your stories!
Judge’s report, February, 2025 Award
Report from our judge, Sarah Freligh
There’s a famous story about United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, when asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, responded: “I know it when I see it.” I admit that I was hoping for the same regarding the fifty longlisted stories Jude Higgins sent my way: that the top five stories would magically present themselves with a trumpet fanfare and a chorus line of high-kicking dancers so of course I would know the winners when I saw them.
Truth is, it was a little (read: a lot) more complicated than that, especially when the entries felt so much like snowflakes, each of them unique and beautiful and entirely original in their execution. I read stories drawn from “real life” while others were anchored in a speculative world; stories that commanded attention from a fist punch of a first sentence and others that started quietly yet stealthily and accrued power and tension with each sentence. So no, I didn’t “know it when I see it,” but the five stories I’ve chosen out of the fifty on the longlist impressed me with their attention to craft and fealty to story.
I should say here that I’d be remiss not to give a shoutout to a couple of shortlisted stories I can’t stop thinking about, among them: The Body Is Capable of So Many Hungers (for its deep-dive into the many iterations of “hunger”), Breath and Bone (for its poignant exploration of obligation and love, even when its hard) and One Sugar (for its terrific narrative voice).
Writing about the short story, Edgar Allan Poe argued for the necessity of a “unity of effect,” i.e., how each choice an author makes during the drafting and revising of a story must be deliberate and intentional, in service to the story’s conflict, characters and themes. Ultimately, that’s the yardstick I used to decide on the five finalists. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
Highly Commended: Forgive Me Martha
I love how the author takes the convention of a confession, the sacrament of penance, and knocks it on its head. There’s just enough of the confessional to be recognizable here and yet the writer alters it in enough ways as to create something new and fresh. That’s evident from the very first sentence, with the “Forgive me Martha,” a conceit that’s held aloft until the final – wonderful!— word “Amend.” The point of view of a first-person narrator addressing another character can be such a high wire act, so easy to take a misstep and tumble into the land of exposition for the sake of the reader, but the writer avoids that by gradually raising the stakes of the narrative with each stated truth, alternately poignant and hilarious, eventually revealing the reason for what’s brought them here to the “confessional.”
Highly Commended: How to Fold a World Map
I’m a sucker for “how to” titles for the bit of mystery they present and the suggestion that the story will answer the implicit question that’s raised in the title. This one amazed and surprised me with its bit of misdirection in the first sentence, which is not the voice of instruction as so often is the case with a “how to” title, but something else altogether. The situation – someone from the ICU is calling – and the odd action—“. . . I was folding Mongolia” – is a knockout combination for a first sentence: a character, a conflict and a bit of mystery. Reading this, we come to understand that the act of folding those maps is a coping device for the narrator, actions that they repeat in order to distract and deflect them from situation in front of them: the unnamed “you,” a loved one in an ICU bed and their impending loss. It’s a stunning capture of a few moments in these characters’ lives, an intersection during which so much changes.
First Place: Like Dynamite
Of all the definitions out there of “story,” I think my favorite is that it’s “a container for change”—a requisite element for a novel or a standard-length short story, but so very hard to pull off in a micro of three hundred words or fewer. But my first-place choice, “Like Dynamite,” does this brilliantly with each and every word, image, action and – yes – even and most especially the punctuation. This writer understands the power of words, not merely their meaning in a sentence or an image, but the sounds and cadence of each and every syllable. Essentially, the story is one long sentence, but a sentence parceled out by semicolons, each phrase alluding to a different “time” and a different action in which these boys, Ben and Mark, try to obliterate themselves and their need. Rather than the breathlessness of no punctuation, the semicolons underscore the boys’ starts and stops, each try and fail, until the last “time” when “they sprinted clean past the parking lot and on down Rutger Road” and the prose, unfettered, rises and pushes us and them toward that amazingly powerful and haunting ending. Throughout this story, the anaphora of “the time” is a drumbeat accompanying the rising story arc, each time bringing them – and us – closer, closer to that inevitable end.
Truly, it’s like dynamite.
Second Place: Pack
Everything in this story – from the title to the last words – establishes and then supports the conceit of these teenage girls as something feral and predatory, something to be feared and obeyed or else: “our power a warning, a thirst, a howl echoing in the sky.” The title “Pack,” with its evocation of survival in numbers, sets the table so effectively for the feast that follows and the plural first-person point of view of the collective “we” is the perfect vehicle to drive that notion. Paired early on with verbs like “prowl” and “scuttles,” the reader is immediately dropped into a world of mock-or-be-mocked and each repetition of “we” and what they do to maintain their place in the pecking order raises the stakes and deepens and expands the characterization of this group. I love, too, how, in the last paragraph, the girls finally morph into animals with their “tuffs of down, thick as cream”—I swear I can smell the blood on their whiskers! Above all, there’s something universal at work here, something that speaks uneasily to the present day where cruelty rules and kindness is something weak, an underbelly to be attacked for its hopeful vulnerability.
Third Place: Eloise Writes as the World Burns
The title is such a fabulous tip-off to the meta-ness of this story, its allusion to the overriding theme of writer as god. I love how the first sentence of the story drops us immediately into this situation—a bomb is dropped “on the fictional McElroy farmhouse”—and reading this, we both witness and understand the ability of the “author”—Eloise—to wreak havoc or spare characters with a few cross-outs or keystrokes. There’s a sense early on that Eloise as author is in charge of this world—in essence, “playing God on paper”—which shifts into something else by story’s end, something that’s grown beyond her authorial control. A church is bombed and “she plucks the Browns’ youngest from the pew,” but despite sending “more ambulances, more fires brigades, more volunteers” . . . “the city still burns and burns.” The conflict, then, becomes the story itself and the author’s struggle to maintain control and direction of the story to the point where she “gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys” nightly and hides them in safe places, in “hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence” – a suggestion, perhaps, that at some point, our stories take the wheel and we, as authors, are just along for the ride.
Short List, February 2025 Award
Huge congratulations to the twenty authors who have made our 29th Award short list
Author names are yet to be announced, so while it is fine to share you are on the short list, please do not identify yourself with your particular fiction at this stage.
Winners will be announced by the end of the month. Any questions, contact us.
February 2025 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.
Winners: Novella-in-Flash Award ,2025
Huge congratulations to our 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Award winners, the first, second and third prizes and the two highly commended, selected by Bath Flash Fiction Awards founder, Jude Higgins. Read Jude’s comments about them here. The top three novellas will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction and will be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol (18th-20th July).
First Prize: In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit by Debra A. Daniel
Debra A. Daniel, is the author of two novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster (Ad Hoc Fiction), novel Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (Muddy Ford Press) and poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August (Finishing Line Press) and As Is (Main Street Rag). She won the Fractured Lit Work/Play Challenge and was third place in Flash Fiction Magazine. She’s been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fictions, has been long listed and shortlisted in many competitions, and has won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize. She was twice named SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellow, won the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, as well as numerous awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has appeared in journals and anthologies including: With One Eye on the Cows, Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road, The Los Angeles Review, Fall Lines, Smokelong Quarterly, Kakalak, Emrys Journal, Pequin, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, Gargoyle. She is retired from a career in teaching, now sings in a band with her husband, and was once on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.’
Runner-up: Spin of the Triangle by Stephanie Carty
Stephanie Carty is a writer and clinical psychologist in the UK. Her short fiction is widely published and placed in competitions. Her novella-in-flash Three Sisters of Stone won a Saboteur Award and her short fiction collection The Peculiarities of Yearning won an Eyelands Book Award. She has published two psychological suspense novels and two writers’ guides – Inside Fictional Minds on the psychology of character and The Writing Mirror on analysing your writing to better understand yourself.
Runner Up:The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay
Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), and the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash Fiction Award anthologies, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social
Highly Commended:: Codewords by Justine Sweeney
Justine Sweeney is an Irish writer with an MA in Creative Writing from University of Hull. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and the Bath Flash Anthology. Her first Novella-in-flash, Codewords, is a work of fiction which draws on her experience growing up in Belfast during the political conflict known as the Troubles.
Highly Commended:Playing with Fire by Bettyjoyce Nash
BettyJoyce Nash writes essays, articles, and stories. Her work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Reckon Review, Across the Margin, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Everybody Here is Kin (Madville Publishing, 2023), was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. Her writing has also been recognized with fellowships from artists’ retreats, including the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland. A chapter from her flash novella, Playing With Fire, appears in The Weather Where You Are, Bath Flash Fiction Volume Eight. She lives in Charlottesville, VA.
Title Word Count from our 1st Prize Winners
With the end of the 29th £1460 prize fund Award, judged by Sarah Freligh coming up this Sunday, 2nd February (thank you to all who have entered so far) I had a look at the title word counts of the first prize winners since our inaugural award winner in October 2015! Have a read of the stories and how the titles work with them. We’re split pretty evenly between one, two and three word title stories, with two word stories just pipping it at eight. And just the two five worders and the one ten worder!
I will have a look at the title word count for the second prize winners next. It might be quite different…
Stories linked here:
One word titles:
Detente by Dawn Tasaka Steffler
Sequelae by Rachel Blake
Angie by Marissa Hoffman
Pony by Rose McDonagh
Siren by Fiona J Mackintosh
Extremeties by K M Elkes
Cleft by Gaynor Jones
Two Word Titles:
Snow Crow by Doug Ramspeck
Sea Change by Fiona Perry
Remembered Yellow by William Davidson
Blessings, 1849 by Johanna Robinson
Terra Incognito by Sharon Telfer
Market Forces by Louie Fooks
Radio Alarm by William Davidson
Candy Girls by Christina Dalcher
Three Word Titles
Eight Spare Bullets by Sharon Telfer
The Button Wife by Dara Yen Elerath
Tying the Boats by Amanda O’Callaghan
Visiting Lenin’s Tomb by Kathryn Aldridge Morris
Roll and Curl by Ingrid Jendzrejewski
One in Twenty-Three by Helen Rye
Four Word Titles
Let Them Eat First by Geeta Sanker
A Roadmap of Womanhood by Louise Mangos
A Palimpsest of Cheerleaders by Mairead Robinson
Five word Titles
A Cock Among the Bathers by Sara Hills
The Metamorphosis of Evaline Jackson by Kathy Hoyle
And One 10 word title!
Things Left and Found at the Side of the Road by Jo Gatford
Aerth by Deborah Tomkins, a prize winning novella-in-flash
Congratulations to Deborah Tomkins, whose novella-in-flash Aerth which won the inaugural Weather Glass Books, Novella prize, judged by Ali Smith is released today, 25th January. Jude attended a book launch for Aerth on Thursday this week in Stanfords bookstore in central Bristol where Deborah read stories from different parts of the novella, to a packed room (lots of flash fiction writers there!) and gave really interesting answers to the excellent questions from the manager of the bookshop. At the event, Deborah said the novella as a whole was inspired by one initial story written in a novella-in-flash workshop which Jude ran (I think with Meg Pokrass) in the flash fiction festival in Bristol back in 2018. She went on to write a shorter version of the novella, which was longlisted in the Bath Novella in Flash Award in 2019 under the title First Do No Harm.. It’s wonderful to know that this later and longer version (about 30,000 wors now) a rivetting and moving novella and a very special read won The Weather Glass novella prize. The plot is summed up beautfully in the quote on the back reproduced below. Do buy it!
Stanfords launch of Aerth
Magnus lives on Aerth, which is currently moving into an Ice Age, with a strange virus limiting the population. When the planet Urth is discovered, he vows to become an astronaut and travel there, but on arriving he finds it hot, crowded, corrupt and violent, despite it being initially welcoming. Slowly Magnus realises he will not find what he’s looking for, but there seems no way back. Aerth is a story about migration, climate, conspiracy theories and interplanetary homelessness. Ali Smith says: ‘What planet are we on? Can we leave? Does it mean we can never go home again if we do? What does a phrase like worlds apart really mean? Deep-forged, witty and resonant, this dimensionally stunning novella deals with dystopia and hope in a way that reveals them as profoundly related. A work of real energy and narrative grip, brilliantly earthy and airy at once, it blasts open a reader’s past/future consciousness and taps into literary antecedents as disparate as Hardy and Atwood. Funny, terrifying, humane, this is a thrilling journey in a story the size of a planet – no, the size of several, all of them altogether strange and uncannily familiar.'</
Here are some reviews from major publications:
“This novella, so concisely written, is a triumph: both an intelligent sci-fi thriller and a thought-provoking parable.” Luke Kennard (Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, January 2025).
“Moving and thought-provoking, this is a memorable debut from a writer to watch.” Lisa Tuttle (The Guardian, January 2025)
“Deep-forged, witty and resonant, this dimensionally stunning novella deals with dystopia and hope in a way that reveals them as profoundly related.” Ali Smith, 2024
“I just fell in love with this very odd story…I hope a lot of people read this novel…One of the best books I’ve read in a long time…part science fiction, part dystopia, part coming of age story, it is so unique.” Eric Karl Anderson, The Lonesome Reader, book reviewer. 27/12/24; 5/1/25
“Aerth is a rare gift of a novel, tender but powerful, infinitely generous despite its slender page count.” Peter Birchenough, Stanfords Bristol. December 2024.
“How do we get a fix on home? We leave it, of course. In this splendid novel, we leave it for two parallel homes, two variants on Earth, each familiar in different, troubling ways. AERTH reminds us of Ursula K Le Guin’s anthropological science fiction and the interplanetary melancholy of THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, yet it is entirely its own vision: a deeply felt story of exile and loss and recovery. Brimming with humour and ecological wisdom, it’s one of those books you look forward to reading as soon as you’ve read it.” Gregory Norminton, December 2024.
Best Small Fictions 2024 Nominations
At Bath Flash Fiction, we nominate our top prize winners for the different awards in the world of flash fiction and are delighted, this year, to nominate prize winners from 2024 for the next anthology of Best Small Fictions. They accept five nominations. (We wish it were more!) Several of our prize winning authors have been included in Best Small Fictions over the years, so best wishes for these five fantastic stories and to their authors.
From February 2024: A Palimpsest of Cheerleaders by Mairead Robinson and
All the Things That We Are Not by Jo Withers
From June 2024: A Cock Among the Bathers by Sara Hills
Driving my Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab by Emily Rinkema
From October 2024: Visiting Lenin’s Tomb by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris.
Want to be in with a chance to win the first contest of 2025? Enter our 29th Award (judged by Sarah Freligh,
Closes in two weeks on Sunday February 2nd at midnight GMT.
PS (Our 2024 anthology full of longlisted, shortlisted and winning pieces is, due to several factors,very delayed. But we hope it will be with contributors soon. We haven’t forgotten you).
Judge’s comments on 2025 Novella-in-Flash Award
I have selected the longlist for our NIF Award since the inaugural year, 2017, reading over the past nine years, several hundred novellas. We don’t receive a huge number of entries (compared to the numbers who enter our three times a year single flash award). This year we received just over 80 submissions But I so appreciate everyone who has entered since our first award. Some writers have entered several times. It’s a difficult form to write and as someone who has written, but not yet completed several novellas-in-flash, I have learned a great deal from reading so many good NIFS.
This time, there were many inventive takes on the novella-in-flash form, some surreal and highly metaphorical, others with fragmentary structures, others with more traditional story telling. The subjects ranged widely. Many focussed on relationships in the wider context of today’s world including climate change and political events. Historical novellas, mainly set in the 19th and 20th centuries featured strongly and included strong dilemmas or shocking occurrences, which have relevance to today.
The novella-in-flash has evolved over the years since our first Award and some of the criteria for the form has altered over this time. Because including context is necessary for the flow of the story, not all flash fictions can stand alone as a story outside the novella. In my close reading I was, however, wanting what I call ‘a felt gap’ in between pieces. This could be a time leap, a different situation for the character, or a shift to another character’s perspective. At the same time, stories needed to have enough ‘connective tissue’ to flow, but not to flow seamlessly from chapter to chapter like a traditional novella. Each ‘chapter’ needed to feel like a complete flash fiction, rather than fragment or a traditional chapter. I am interested in the many variations possible in the the flash fiction form, and if experiemental flash forms (for eg, list stories, stories in letter form or revisioned fairy tales) worked with the story flow, I was happy to see them.
Judges of writing competitions frequently say it is the stories that stay with them which end up the top five. This was the case with me. I felt very involved with the characters in the winning novellas. I could strongly visualise where they were. I was moved. I rooted for them, hoping they could overcome obstacles, held my breath, wanted their lives to turn out well. I was drawn in at the beginning and felt satisfied with the endings.
I’m looking forward to seeing the top three novellas in print, published by our small press, Ad Hoc Fiction and launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in July, this year. Very best wishes to the highly commended authors for future publication and to all the authors with stories in our long and short lists. In the past many novellas entered for our awards have been published elsewhere and won prizes.
Here are my selections (and you can read the biographies of the authors on our winners’ pages)
!st Prize: In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit
I loved this novella on many levels. I liked its close focus on the life of a family in the USA in the 1960s and how they navigate day to day situations. I liked the POV, in the strong and believable voice of a young teenaged girl, and the way she thinks about her family and relates to them. The adults are flawed but believable too — a fearful grandmother who makes doom-laden remarks and has many strange habits, a self-preoccupied mother, a father who spends much time away from the home and an aunt who reveals secrets. We learn more about why the adults are like this as the novella progresses, sometimes via the aunt and often by the inclusion of ‘list’ stories, which add depth to the characters. It is clear the girl loves her parents and grandmother even though she longs for a ‘show family’ of the kind she sees on the television where they are happily together. The novella is moving, and also has humour — a great combination. The use of the rabbit motif threading through, adds a further depth. In the end, the family, in crisis, does pull together.
Runner-Up: The Lives of the Dead
Newly married Kate, is in an unequal relationship. Her husband holds a firm grip on their future, his hand literally holding tight on her wrist, causes small bruise marks and this motif continues throught the novella. He wants children immediately, would like them to have four, for her to be a stay-at-home mum. Kate wants a different future and struggles to find her own way through. The author has structured the novella brilliantly with Kate’s journey to self-realisation interspersed with re-visioned fairy tales. The fairy tales offer great depth to how the story unfolds and invite many reads to get their full impact. The interior focus of the POV shows Kate’s sometimes guilty struggles about motherhood and competing desires very well.
Runner-Up: Spin of the Triangle
This novella-in-flash tackles an important and difficult subject in a very skillful way. We are introduced to the different women who take part a baby-trafficking business. They are all vulnerable and have lived lives where they have been exploited in many different ways. The author shows the characters in the novella convincingly occupying each of the three roles in the victim, persecutor and rescuer triangle, at different times. In the end, we see that it may be possible for them to step out of moving around this triangle and have a different life. I was impressed by the individual stories in different POVs All aspects of the baby-trafficking business are covered, from the young girls manipulated to give up their babies, the grief of those who regret their choices, the office manager deadening her feelings with alchohol, the lies told about the babies’ origins. And in the background, the men who control it all.
Highly Commended: Playing With Fire
In this novella, we follow the journey of Jewell as she develops a career as a potter after the break up of her marriage, Jewell is an engaging protagonist who has the courage and determination to carry on and overcome obstacles to success. The author uses the different states of clay — Greenware, Bisque, Glaze, in the three different sections of the novella to show how Jewell progresses and this works very well. The dialogue between Jewell and the other characters is fresh and lively as are the titles of each short flash chapter, which further enhance the whole piece. Set in the US in 1980s, it gives a vivd portrayal of the times.
Highly Commended: Codewords
From the very first story in Codewords, the author gives us a vivid picutre in full sensory detail of life in Belfast in the 1980s/90s —during the time of ‘The Troubles’, The Northern Ireland Conflict, where day to day living involves people existting in deep fear of what might happen to them, from shootings,to knee-cappings, buses burning and bombs. Codewords shows the impact on various families, mainly through the voices of children, in an extremely powerful way. Adults talk in code, sometimes to try and protect the children. And this strategy echos through the novella in different ways. It’s hard for children to work out what the adults mean and sometimes even more frightening to hear half-truths. The mixture of what is said and what is not said is very effective.