Bath Flash Fiction Award
Here’s a summary of BFFA’s journey in the last ten years:
- Diane Simmons, now co-director of National Flash Fiction Day UK, was one of the people who prompted me to begin a flash fiction award. I was (and still am) one of the team running the Bath Short Story Award and she thought there was room for a Bath Flash Fiction Award too. I’d begun to write flash two years previously and so I took the challenge. Thanks Diane. She isn’t a member of our BFFA team but has been very supportive of the Award since
- With help of John O.Shea, a free lance adminstrator, who still works for me, I opened up for the very first Award in February 2015. Our BFFA team thought we had an excellent idea — to close it as soon as 1000 entries were reached. We imagined people would love this and flock to enter straightaway as there was a £1000 first prize and it would all be over in a couple of weeks! Of course, writers need to get used to something new and also like to plan out in advance what they enter. Eventually we reached 1000 entries in
October 2015. And the first winner was William Davidson from the Uk who also won for a second time in 2023.
In April 2015. under the umbrella of Bath Flash Fiction, we also opened a free weekly contest called Ad Hoc Fiction for micros of 150 words or less There was a form with a counter to check the word count and stories had to include a word prompt. Winners of this contest were published in the weekly ebook and received a free entry to the main award. This weekly contest, judged by public votes, ran extremely sucessfully for about four years with entrants from around the world, until it became too much work for our admin in 2019. Many writers, like Nick Black and Louise Mangos, won several times and winner Sharon Telfer, used her free entry when she won Ad Hoc with her micro Telegraph to submit to the main Award, which she won in 2016 with Terra Incognito
Scroll down the archive of posts at Ad Hoc Fiction and you will find the weekly stories there. Lots of them also illustrated.
- In November 2015 we shifted to traditional style of Award with a set deadline. It continues to be a rolling award with deadlines three times a year — in February, June and October. At that time, we also offered a print anthology with a publication offer for winners, and short and long listed writers This has continued ever since. With the delayed 2024 anthology, The Constancy of Pigeons out in the next couple of weeks.
- Also in October 2015, we opened a small fiction press under the name of Ad Hoc Fiction with an online bookshop to sell the books. About 80 books focussing on Flash fiction have been published since.
The first anthology and our first Ad Hoc Fiction publication is To Carry Her Home ;,(title from a wonderful story by Christopher Allen) was published in March 2017. It includes stories from the 2016 Awards and some from the 2015 Awards. We published a second anthology from the 2017 Awards (The Lobsters Run Free) at the end of 2017.
To Carry Her Home Bath Flash Fiction Volume One
- In 2017 Bath Flash Fiction Award (along with the Arts Council) sponsored the first Flash Fiction Festival and we, along with Ad Hoc Fiction, continue to do this.
- We opened the yearly Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Award in 2016 and Ad Hoc Fiction has published nearly fifty novellas mainly from these awards since. This year’s novellas will be launched the Flash Fiction Festival Uk, this July. Several of these novellas have won or been shortlisted in prizes including the Saboteur Awards and the Rubery Prize.
I think I have all the main points. If we can continue for another ten years, that would be wonderful! But the last ten have been such an exciting ride and we are very happy to have published so many different writers and got them interested in Flash Fiction!
Jude, founder, Bath Flash Fiction Award
May 2025.
