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!

We’re delighted to welcome Sara Hills as the judge for our 25th Award open today and closing in October. Sara is the author of The Evolution of Birds (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection. She has won the Quiet Man Dave flash nonfiction prize, the Retreat West quarterly prize, and the National Flash Fiction Day micro competition. Sara’s work has just won second prize in our 24th Award, judged by Tim Craig. Previously, she’s been twice commended in our Award. She’s also placed second in the Welkin Prize, and was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021 and 2022. Her stories have been widely published in anthologies and magazines, including The Best Small Fictions 2022 and 2023, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, Fractured Lit, Cease Cows, Flash Frog, X-RAY Lit, Splonk, New Flash Fiction Review and elsewhere. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, UK and tweets from @sarahillswrites. Read in Full

Tim’s General Comments

Damn, but this was hard. And inspiring. And fun. But hard.
I don’t think there were many stories in my long list of 50 which didn’t at some point occupy a seat, however briefly, in my short list of 20. Such was the standard.
You will doubtless disagree with some of my choices. I disagreed with some of my choices. But, in the end, the stories which made my final list of five were those which battled for my attention, won it, and held it for a long time after I’d finished reading them.
There were many stories on the long- and short lists which were beautifully structured and beautifully written; some which evoked powerful and/or tragic historical events; several which found new and clever ways to harbour time-worn human truths; which experimented with form and language in ingenious, original ways. To the writers of these wonderful tours de force of flash, I can only apologise there weren’t more places in the winners’ enclosure.
Ultimately, I was drawn to those stories which felt perhaps less formulaic, less heavily structured; stories where character and mood were granted at least the same weight as plot and theme, and which didn’t necessarily give up all their secrets on first, or even fifth, reading.
Thanks to everyone who entered this amazing competition for giving me such difficult decisions to make, to the readers who did such a great job of whittling the original entries down to the long list, and, of course, to Jude and the team at Ad Hoc Fiction for the honour of being its judge. Read in Full

Originally from Manchester, Tim Craig lives in London. A previous winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his short-short fiction has placed or been commended four times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award and has also appeared in the Best Microfiction 2019 and 2022 anthologies. His debut collection Now You See Him was published in 2022 by AdHoc Fiction.

A big thank you to Tim for being our judge. Our small press, Ad Hoc Fiction was honoured to publish Tim’s fantastic debut collection, Now You See Him last June. You can read more about the book here in an interview we did with Tim prior to publication. Christopher Allen, of SmokeLong Quarterly wrote on the back cover:

‘Tim Craig is a master of microfiction. With enviable confidence, Craig spins the most varied, playful and poignant tales. The stories in this collection, most a single tight page of killer prose, all deserve revisiting again and again and again.’

Read in Full

Bio: Sudha Balagopal is honored to have her writing in many fine journals including CRAFT, Split Lip, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc fiction in 2021. She has work included in both Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions, 2022. Her work is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50: 2019, 2021, longlisted 2022. Find her on Twitter @authorsudha

We’re delighted to welcome Sudha Balagopol as judge for our 23rd Award which opens November 1st and closes on Sunday, February 5th, 2023 (Results out at the end of February). Read Jude’s interview with her below, where Sudha tells us about her long writing journey and how she became interested in writing flash. There are links to some of her own wonderful stories, and stories by others, showing her interest in different styles and forms of flash fiction plus tips on what she is looking for in competition entries.

Read in Full