Tag Archives: Best Small Fictions

Best Small Fictions Acceptances!

Big congratulations to Sara Hills and Emily Rinkema whose prize-winning flashfictions have been selected by the editors at Best Small Fictions! Sara’s story A Cock Among the Bathers won first prize and ‘Driving My Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit his Mother at Rehab‘ by Emily Rinkema, won second prize in our June Award last year. We always nominate our winners for Best Small Fictions and it is such a honour to have these two excellent stories chosen for the 2025 Best Small Ficitons anthology. Thank you very much to the team of editors and guest editor, the legendary Robert Shapard, whose article on short short fiction we quoted when BFFA first opened in 2015.
You can see the entire list of authors selected for the anthology and read more about Best Small Fictions here

The two selected stories, linked above, are also included in the delayed 2024 BFFA anthology The Constancy of Woodpigeons which is now at the printers and will be officially launched at the Flash Fiction Festival 18-20th July in Bristol. Sara Hills is on the festival team and will be reading her winning piece and several other winning and listed authors will be reading too.

The closing date for our 30th £1460 prize fund Award, judged by Marie Gethins is in just over two weeks on Sunday, 8th June. Results out at the end of June. We nominate stories at the end of the year when the different nomination opportunities are open again. Best wishes to all!

Jude, May 22nd, 2024

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Nominations: Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions 2021

It’s that time of year again! As always, we are nominating from our winners in the Bath Flash Award over the year – fictions selected by our judges Santino Prinzi, Mary Jane Holmes and Nod Ghosh. We are allowed to nominate six stories for the Pushcart Prize and five for Best Small Fictions. Many congratulations and best wishes to all!

You can link below to read all these stories and they will also be published on December 4th in our 2020 Bath Flash Fiction anthology Restore to Factory Settings, pictured here, which will be available to buy from Ad Hoc Fiction, Amazon and Waterstones, UK.


Pushcart prize,
Sea Change by Fiona Perry, first prize flash fiction, selected by Mary Jane Holmes in our June 2020 Award.
The White Dwarf, Jan Kaneen, third prize winner, selected by Nod Ghosh for the October Award.
The reallocation of a child’s atoms by Jim Toal, commended by Nod Ghosh in the October Award.
The Man You Didn’t Marry by Sam Payne,third prize in our June 2020 Award, selected by Mary Jane Holmes
The Price of Gingerbread, by Stephanie Carty commended in our February Award by Santino Prinzi
Our fathers, who we have strewn like seaweed behind us by Alison Powell, commended in our October Award by Nod Ghosh

Best Small Fictions 2021
Eight Spare Bullets, by Sharon Telfer first prize selected by Santino Prinzi in our February 2020 Award
The Dissolution of Peter McCaffrey by Simon Cowdroysecond prize selected by Santino Prinzi in our February 2020 Award
Blessings, 1849, first prize selected by Nod Ghosh in our October 2020 Award
The species of pangolin compromise their own order:Pholidota, by Hannah Storm, second prize in our June 2020 Award, selected by Mary Jane Holmes
Mother,Before, by Tara Isabel Zambrano second prize in our October 2020 Award selected by Nod Ghosh

Note: We can’t nominate for Best Microfictions as they just accept stories published online and not in anthologies.

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Interview with Michelle Elvy, Judge Novella-in-Flash Award 2022

    We thrilled Michelle, who judged our 2021 and selected some fantastic novellas in flash, ten of which (winners and shortlisted) are being published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021, has agreed to judge the 2022 Novella-in-Flash Award, open for entries shortly and will close in mid January, 2022 Results out April, 2021 Read Jude’s interview with her below if you want to write a novella for our Award. Michelle has many interesting things to say about the form and the process of writing a novella-in-flash.

Read in Full

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2019 Flash Fiction Highlights

Thank you so much to everyone in the world-wide flash fiction community who supported all our enterprises in 2019 and helped them thrive. It’s really been a great year for Bath Flash Fiction. We ran three more successful single flash fiction awards, our third novella-in- flash award, our third Flash Fiction Festival, hosted several reading events and Ad Hoc Fiction, our fantastic short-short press, published twelve new flash fiction books pictured above, which are all available to buy from the online bookshop in several different currencies. And, in a first for Ad Hoc Fiction, the everrumble by New Zealand based author, Michelle Elvy first published in the UK in June, 2019 and launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, is now published and available to buy in New Zealand. More details on our year-in-flash below:
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Michelle Elvy, published by Ad Hoc Fiction, June 2019

Ad Hoc Fiction is honoured to be publishing the everrumble, “a small novel in small forms” by Michelle Elvy. It’s a wonderful and important work of fiction highly praised by the writers quoted below. The striking cover art is by acclaimed Ethiopian artist, Eyayu Genet.

“the everrumble is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas. Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began.”
the everrumble was launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, UK on 28th-30th June where Michelle ran workshops, chaired a panel on Flash Around the World, introduced the latest Best Small Fiction anthology, and talked about flash fiction in New Zealand. It is for sale at the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop in paperback in several different currencies and in Kindle ebook format via Amazon. Read in Full

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Highlights from Bath Flash Fiction, 2018

2018 has been a fabulous year for Bath Flash Fiction and our publisher, Ad Hoc Fiction. We began the year with a joint launch of The Lobsters Run Free, Bath Flash Fiction Vol Two, the Ad Hoc Fiction published anthology from the 2017 Awards and Flash Fiction Festival One, the anthology of flash fictions submitted by particpants and presenters from the first Flash Fiction Festival in Bath. Thirteen writers, pictured on the left and below, who had fictions in one or both of the anthologies read their micros at the event. It was very pacy and fun. Read in Full

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Nominations 2018-2019

We like to nominate winners’ stories from the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and the Ad Hoc Fiction winners for yearly anthologies and awards. Authors nominated by us have done very well. This year,’Tying the Boats’ by Amanda O’Callaghan, the first prize winner,from the June 2017 Award selected by judge Meg Pokrass was included in Best Small Fictions 2018 and The Hand That Weilds The Priest by first prize winner, Emily Devane, from the February 2017 Award, judged by Kathy Fish, was included in the long list out of thousands of submissions. ‘Roll and Curl‘, by Ingrid Jendrzejewski first prize winner in the February 2016 round judged by Tania Hershman was longlisted for Best Small Fictions 2017 out of a similar number of submissions, as was ‘White Matter’ by Julianna Holland, which won third prize in the October 2016 round judged by Robert Vaughan. Henry Peplow’s micro ‘Zeus Falls to Earth’, winner of Ad Hoc Fiction in June 2016 was also included in the Best Small Fictions 2017 longlist. Finally, we nominated Charmaine Wilkerson’s novella-in-flash How to Make A Window Snake for the novella category in the Saboteur Awards 2018, and it won the Award.

This year, two new opportunities to nominate stories have arisen. ‘The Best Microfiction 2019 anthology co-edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke for stories 400 words or fewer published in 2018 and the Best 50 Flash Fictions from Britain and Ireland 2018-2019 organised by TSS. We’re also looking forward to nominating our winning authors again for Best Small Fictions 2019. See which stories we’ve currently nominated below. Read in Full

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Writers and Their Dogs

At Bath Flash Fiction, a few winners have mentioned their dogs in interviews with me after their wins. So as we near the end of the October 2018 round of Bath Flash Fiction Award, judged by Nuala 0’Connor, we’re giving the winners’ dogs a spotlight. Dogs are inspirational and we know several other dog-loving flash fiction writers, whose dogs are essential to their writing lives.

Molia Dumbleton’s lovely dog, Huckle is pictured here  with Molia. Molia won third prize in the February 2018 round of Bath Flash Fiction Award judge by Tara L. Masih, with her flash ‘Why Shit is Still Like This Around Here and Probably Always Will Be‘  In my interview with her, I asked her if her dog was her muse. She said. “I think my only muse might be a deadline. Ha! But sadly, kind of true. I go for very, very long walks with my dog and those are pretty essential, just for energizing and de-cluttering the head.” Read in Full

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