There was a full house at the spring Evening of Flash Fiction at St James Wine Vaults, Bath on 17th March. It’s a wonderful venue with a friendly bar downstairs, and we’re made to feel very welcome by owners Mandy and Neil who like to support artistic ventures in the local community.
Our winner and two runners-up tell us a little about themselves.
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We were inspired to launch the inaugural novella-in-flash award by reading the excellent guide on the subject, My Very End of the Universe published by Rose Metal Press in 2014. Meg Pokrass’s flash novella, Here, Where we Live is one of five novellas in this book and she also has a craft essay in the book. The novella-in-flash is one of her favourite emerging forms, and we were thrilled when she agreed to judge the first competition.
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I was honoured to be asked to judge Bath Flash Fiction Award’s inaugural novella-in-flash contest. There were many strong novella entries making the competition fierce. It was fascinating to see the different way each writer approached this challenge!
One of the most important traits of the flash novella is in creating a sense of urgency that pulls the reader in quickly. This is achieved through pacing, stand-alone story strength, and the creation of unforeseeable dramatic tension. Ultimately, success relies on the crafting of an inventive, non-traditional narrative arc. The short nature of the novella-in-flash does not allow for much context or rumination. Instead, it relies on tragic urgency.
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Emma lives on the edge of a Swedish forest and tells us that when she is writing, she often compares the landscapes of Sweden and Scotland, where she is from. In Sweden the seasons are definite, unlike Glasgow, and the skies are very dark with many visible stars. Working as a translator and a teacher of Swedish to refugees, she thinks about words very carefully, and draws inspiration from her knowledge of different languages, the similarities, the differences and the gaps in between. She refers us to a poem to illustrate this. Emma moved from song writing, to writing lyrics which felt like a natural shift and she loves the enormity of what flash can express in a small amount of words. Like many of our other prize winners, her tip for writers who want to enter the Bath Flash Fiction Award is to keep re-reading your work and to get other people to read it too and edit a great deal. Then take the plunge and send. That final action is always worthwhile.
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Congratulations to those who have made it through to our short list.
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A big thank you to everyone who entered, and congratulations to those who have made it through to our long list.
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In association with the Arts Council England, Bath Flash Fiction Award is sponsoring the first ever UK literary festival entirely devoted to flash fiction. Taking place on the weekend of National Flash Fiction Day UK, Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th June, the inaugural Flash Fiction Festival will be held in Bath.
Visit the Flash Fiction Festival site here
Check out our action-packed programme; we’ve organised a great line up of workshop leaders, speakers, writers and teachers of the short and short-short form – Vanessa Gebbie, Paul McVeigh, Tania Hershman, David Gaffney, David Swann, Ashley Chantler, Peter Blair, K M Elkes, Kit de Waal, Michael Loveday, Christopher Feilden, Calum Kerr, Jude Higgins and Meg Pokrass.
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There’s much to learn about writing flash fiction in this interview with Nicholas Cook who won second prize in the February 2017 round of Bath Flash with his wonderfully titled and moving story, The Peculiar Trajectory of Space Objects. Nicholas tells us more about the structure of this piece, white space and about the title and the use of titles in general in short short fiction. We learn about his journey to flash fiction via screen writing and the parallels between writing and coding. He also mentions Jane, his most beautiful greyhound/part Saluki dog, who I think, from the photograph, would be most writers’ favourite muse. I love his writing tip that you can even write about a ‘toaster pastry’ as long as the emotion is there and the language interesting.
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You can now buy To Carry Her Home, Bath Flash Fiction Volume One, designed and published by Ad Hoc Fiction, from this site. It’s a beautifully laid out book, with a striking cover, printed on quality paper and containing 145 fictions of 300 words or less from the first four rounds of the Bath Flash Fiction Award. These contests were judged by authors Annemarie Neary, Tania Hershman, Michelle Elvy and Robert Vaughan and the first twenty-one flash fictions are all the winning and commended pieces. The other 124 stories are a selection of the short listed and long listed pieces from the four rounds arranged in an order we thought worked well. There are 125 authors represented, from eleven different countries – some have more than one flash fiction in the book – a wonderful range of styles and themes. Something for everyone, and a book to read and come back to.
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