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.

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born British writer. Her novel, The Normal State of Mind, was published in 2015 by Parthian (UK) and Bee Books (India) in 2016 and was long listed for the Words to Screen Prize, Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) Film Festival in 2018. Her collection of short stories, Table Manners, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018 and won The Saboteur Prize for the Best Short Story Collection in 2019. She teaches contemporary fiction at Winchester University. She was Writer-in-Residence at Word Factory in 2021. She is a regular workshop presenter at the Flash Fiction Festivals UK. She lives in Winchester.

• Thank you for agreeing to judge our 26th award that closes in February 2024.
  You write novels, short stories, poetry and flash fiction. Do you find in your writing that you switch easily from one form of writing to another?

I’m so excited to be the judge for the Bath Flash Fiction competition. I enjoy writing across forms and I love working in a new medium as I always love a challenge. I don’t necessarily write everything all at once, but I may have a phase of writing lots of poetry. Or a phase of writing flash fiction. Attending festivals, writing group events, workshops is helpful as a lot of work or ideas of new work get produced there. The novel is ever present in the background, and I dedicate chunks of time to focus on that when I can (which is why that is the slowest) and with short stories, I work on one idea at a time until I feel I have perfected it. Getting commissions is great, because then I have a deadline, something to work towards and most of my nonfiction writing is done through commissions. So is writing for radio. My flash fiction writing spree is particularly active closer to National Flash Fiction Day and before and after the Flash Fiction Festival! I don’t juggle all the balls at the same time, but I try and focus on one form for a while, or for a project or competition and then move on to the next. Poetry, I think, is a constant. I don’t share it as much, but I definitely write a lot more poetry than anything else.

• What do you like about writing flash?

I love flash for the immediacy, the sense of urgency in a story. It’s punchy and experimental, and although it could be even 100 words long, it’s no easy feat to create a narrative in those many words which has a plot, character development, emotions, conflict and a punchy that often leaves the reader breathless. It’s a great challenge and to achieve a successful flash fiction requires great skill. I love the flash community as well. Most flash fiction writers are very supportive and enjoy being part of the community without being to competitive. There’s a lot of encouragement to keep writing flash, and lots of events that help this community to grow.

• Recently, some of your short stories were broad cast on BBC radio. Was that under a special theme and is there still a link to listen to them?

I’ve had a few stories on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra.Table Manners was serialized for Radio 4 Extra and I was commissioned to write 2 short stories and a non-fiction piece for Radio 4. The latest is on the theme of Golden Eggs, where five British Asian writers take folktales or traditional stories and rework them in contemporary settings. My story is called ‘The Gift’, and you can listen to it here.

• You are an associate lecturer in Creative Writing in Winchester and have taught workshops and courses in numerous places, both for adults and young people. What upcoming events are you involved in?

I teach on the BA and MA programmes at Winchester University and I really enjoy it. I worked with ArtfulScribe’s Mayflower Young Writers for several years, and found that the young writers find the flash form really exciting as well. At the moment, I run the ArtfulScribe SO:Write Women’s Writing group, which is online on the 1st Thursday of the month and in person in Southampton on the 3rd Saturday of the month. It’s a fantastic way to meet women writers, talk about writing, write together and share work. We’re loving writing flash fiction at the moment!
I also developed and run a short story course for Professional Writing Academy.
What I’m currently excited about are the projects I’ve co-founded with Aiysha Jahan, Bridges not Borders and Write Beyond Borders, which are a combination of mentoring writers from South Asia and UK, doing folkart in schools around the Solent region, producing an anthology of short stories and having an exhibition in Portsmouth Guildhall in July next year.

• You have been a professional writer since 2005. Can you tell us some of the highlights of your career so far?

I think it depends on what one might call ‘a highlight’. Of course, having a book published is always a highlight. So having my debut novel, A Normal State of Mind, published by Parthian was definitely a highlight. Publishing by short story collection, Table Manners, with Dahlia Books was a highlight, and then winning the Saboteur Prize for Best Short Story collection was a highlight. Being a regular BBC Radio 4 listener and then having my stories aired on Radio 4 is a highlight.

But the true highlights that I will hold dear to me are the little things: readers appreciating my work, readers reaching out to me to let me know my words have moved them. For example, finding someone reading my novel in a hospital waiting room was a highlight! A terminally ill friend of my husband’s parking his car to ring him, to let him know he’d just listened to my radio essay about cancer and how much that had resonated with him that meant so much to me. A Year 2 child in my children’s school where I used to work as a dinner lady would stop me on the way to lunch hall to give me ideas for my next book. (They’d been shocked when I had visited their class to talk about writing and shown them my book! They had said, you’re our Dinner Lady. And I had said, Dinner Ladies can do loads of other things outside of the lunch hour!) My daughter forgetting her reading book in secondary school, and her teacher fishing out a book from her bag to give her to read. ‘It’s your mother’s book,’ the teacher said. ‘Have you read it?’ ‘No,’ said my daughter, probably embarrassed at all the attention she would now get. Then all her classmates googled me, and she came home, saying, ‘mum, you’re a celebrity! Google recognizes you as a writer!’ That made me chuckle! Being invited to Cardiff University to talk to MA students about my writing journey has always been special. It’s always a ‘this is where it started, this is how it’s going’ experience! These are some highlights I will remember fondly and forever!

• Finally, as our judge, can you say what sort of story would stand out as a winner for you?

For me, a flash fiction should immerse me in the story. It should feel immediate and also layered with meaning. It should leave something for the reader to work out, or have a moment of epiphany at the end. It could be a story about a theme without mentioning the theme. Think about Hermit Crab style or other ways of approaching a story. The story should make me wake up in the middle of night, still worrying about the characters, or trying to work out how they could work out the stuff they’ve been put through. A standout story would involve me as a reader, and make me care intensely for the character/s. In cricketing lingo, a story should not target the reader head on, give me a good googly ball – a sudden spin that will get you if, as a reader, you’re not ready for it!