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Bath Flash Fiction Award Nominations, 2022

We’ve made our choices for Best Small Fictions, 2022 and The Push Cart Prize from among the wonderful winning and placed stories from the three Bath Flash Fiction Awards this year. Best wishes to all!
Our end of year Bath Flash Fiction Award anthology will be published this month by Ad Hoc Fiction and you will be able to read all the stories we’ve nominated in the book as well as on this website. All stories linked here.
Note: We’re not able to select for Bestmicrofictions as that anthology is for stories that are published in magazines only and are not published or forthcoming in a paperback print book.

Lucky four leaf clover photograph by Dustin Humes, Unsplash

Pushcart Prize Nominations
Let Them Eat First by Geeta Sanker
Reasons You Married A Woman Called Rose by Leonie Rowland
Strong Like Carp by Emma Phillips
Car Trouble, Spartansburg, August 2002 by K.S. Lokensgard
That’s All There is There Ain’t No More by Tim Craig
On Rannoch Moor by Audrey Niven.

Best Small Fictions nominations
Snow Crow by Doug Ramspleck
The Button Wife by Dara Yen Elerath
The Mothers by Jo Gatford
Now You See Him by Tim Craig
Always Down A Dirt Road I am Walking by Sara Hills

Three more novellas in flash available for preorder now!

Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing all the shortlist and winners from the 2021 Novella in Flash Award. Ten novellas in all and today three more are up for preorder.
You can read judge Michelle Elvy’s report here.

One for the River, a story about the tragic death of a young boy in a river by Tom 0’Brien was the runner-up in this year’s Award and he has extended the story for publication so it has even more poignant impact since we read it first at Bath Flash. We’re also pleased that Kipris by Michelle Christophorou a coming of age story set in British occupied Cyprus in the last century has a few extra stories in it, which add to the depth of this little written about period of history. The Listening Project by Ali McGrane focusses brilliantly on other aspects of loss — the loss of hearing and the loss of a brother.

All these books are beautifully written and address important issues in different ways. You can now pre-order at a 25% discount until publication day for all three on Thursday 9th October. We hope to host an online launch shortly and will keep you posted

Below, we’ve added a gallery of these three novellas in flash now up for pre-order and the six others from this year’s award already published and available from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop. They are A Family of Great Falls by Debra A Daniel, Things I Can’t Tell Amma by Sudha Balagopal, The Tony Bone Stories by Al Kratz, Hairy on The Inside by Tracy Fells, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker by Jupiter Jones and Small Things by Hannah Sutherland.

The winner of our last year’s award, Season of Bright Sorrow by David Swann will also be out soon. And if you want to enter next year’s Award, it closes on January 14th and is again judged by writer and editor Michelle Elvy

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Interview with Doug Ramspeck, first prize winner, Oct, 2021

Doug Ramspeck won first prize in our 19th Award, with Snow Crow, a stunning and deeply moving story.You can read judge Sharon Telfer’s comments on it in her judges report. In this interview, Doug, a recently retired Professor of English from Ohio State University in Lima, USA who writes in several different genres, tells us, among other fascinating things, more about his winning piece and his new poetry collections. He talks about looking for the magic in flash and mentions third prize winner Tim Craig’s story That’s All There Is There Ain’t No More as a brilliant example of ‘rule breaking’ in writing. In an amazing co-incidence, we’ve also learned that Doug Ramspeck was the judge who selected Dara Yen Elerath’s debut collection of poetry, Dark Braid as the winner of the 20th John Ciardi Prize for Poetry through BkMk Press. Dara won first prize in our June, 2021 Award with another amazing story, The Button Wife. We’re delighted that Doug is reading his winning piece on November 27th at the next Flash Fiction Festival Day in the 2.30-2.45 pm GMT reading slot. We’re really looking forward to hearing it in his own voice. Hope you can come!

Interview

We agree with our 19th Award judge, Sharon Telfer, that your first prize winning story ‘Snow Crow’ is a stunning piece of writing,”brimming with tension and mystery”. Can you tell us what inspired this story and the process of writing it?

Read in Full

Interview with Karen Jones, 20th Award Judge

Karen Jones is a flash and short story writer from Glasgow, Scotland. Her flashes have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Micro Fiction and The Pushcart Prize, and her story 'Small Mercies' was included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and BIFFY50 2019. In 2021 she won first prize in the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize, Flash 500, Reflex Fiction and Retreat West Monthly Micro and was short listed for To Hull and Back, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bath Short Story Award and longlisted for Fractured Lit Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines. Her novella-in-flash, When It’s Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She is Special Features Editor at New Flash Fiction Review.

We’re delighted that Karen Jones has agreed to be our 20th Award Judge. In this intervoew we learn what makes a stand-out flash fiction for her, more about her own writing journey, and at the end she’s given a great prompt to get you writing a new story. Read in Full

19th Award Round Up

Thank you again to all who entered our 19th Award and sent in stories from around the world. We appreciate your support very much and greatly enjoyed reading the huge variety of stories we received. This time, 1212 flash fictions from 44 countries, listed below. It’s wonderful to know there are flash fiction writers in all these different places.

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, Zambia

Read in Full

Judge’s report, October 2021

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

October 2021 Shortlist

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award short list.

Read in Full

October 2021 Longlist

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

Read in Full

Happy Book Birthday! – The first year of Going Short, by Nancy Stohlman

We’re very happy at Ad Hoc Fiction and Bath Flash Fiction to be celebrating the first birthday of the publication of Going Short – an Invitation to Flash Fiction, which was published by Ad Hoc Fiction on October 15th, 2020 and launched on Zoom with readings from different writers who have attended Nancy’s courses and retreats over the years. Going Short is available from Amazon worldwide in paperback and ebook formats and directly from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop (all links to Amazon in different countries are on the shop page). Read in Full

The Last Minute Club – open Sunday 10th Oct!

Thanks so much flash fiction writers, for your fantastic support for our Bath Flash Fiction Awards. Our readers are very busy reading your entries for the 22nd Award, this time judged by Emily Devane who is also running a editing workshop for our online flash fiction day tomorrow, Saturday 8th October. It’s going to get even busier for our initial readers tomorrow and Sunday.

To remind everyone, The Last Minute Club, for intrepid flash fictioneers is open only on the final day of this Award, Sunday 10th October. Anyone entering on Sunday will receive a (virtual) Last Minute Club badge. Collectible and in a new colour! We’ve a mini competition beginning now over on Twitter where the first person to guess the colour of the new badge will receive a Bath Flash Fiction anthology.You won’t know the colour until first thing on Sunday morning.

And if you enter on Sunday and receive your badge, do share on Twitter. We love that. It makes it such a fun day!

The first badge was introduced in June 2018. And the one you can collect on Sunday will be the fourteenth badge.I wonder if anyone has received and saved the whole series? Here they all are on the gallery:

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Best wishes for all your entries. It’s always wonderful to receive stories from around the world.

Results out on 31st October.