We’re delighted that Kathryn Aldridge Morris, a first prize and highly commended writer in previous competitions, has agreed to be our 31st Award judge.

Kathryn is a Bristol-based writer whose work has been widely published in anthologies and literary journals including Pithead Chapel, Aesthetica, The Four Faced Liar, Fractured Lit, Stanchion Magazine, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres, New Flash Fiction Review and elsewhere. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge’s Flash Nonfiction competition, Lucent Dreaming’s flash fiction contest, and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work has been selected twice for the Wigleaf Top 50. She was recently awarded an Arts Council England grant to write a novella in flash. Her debut collection Cold Toast was published by Dahlia Books in May 2025.

Q & A

• You won first prize in our Award in October 2024 with your story ‘Visiting Lenin’s Tomb’, linked above. In our interview with you last year you described how you came to write this story and how you like playing with the form. Do you have a preference for writing and reading flash that is experimental in some way.

That’s a good question! Sometimes my starting point might be an idea for a hybrid story, but more often, experimenting and play will be part of my revision process, especially if I feel stuck with a piece. The playfulness helps me push past any notions of internal or external expectations of what my writing should be doing and create something fresh.
I get excited when I come across a flash fiction which innovates or suggests new ways of storytelling, but overall, it’s story and voice which are paramount for me. Unless an unusual form or structure is serving the story, it can risk feeling gimmicky. I love stories which are bold and voicey. I am a fan of pared back prose. Of the understated. The absurd. Of dark humour. Writing packed with tension and unspoken emotion.

• Your flash fiction collection Cold Toast was published by Dahlia Books in May. Can you tell us something about the collection and where it is for sale?

It’s a collection of stories centring the experience of girls and women in the 70s and 80s, while the final stories emerge blinking into the nineties. Many are thematically linked, with recurring motifs and callbacks, and the stories have been sequenced to create a sense of movement through time and relationships. It was a lot of work, but I loved creating a new whole from all these parts. Michael Loveday talks about some collections of stories being at the far end of the spectrum of novellas in flash, in that the stories ‘incrementally construct an overall picture’ creating a ‘cumulative effect of the whole.’ In this sense, I’d like to think my stories set out to construct an overall picture of the Everywoman during the 70s and 80s; of the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.

It’s available to be shipped in the UK and overseas from Dahlia Books – thanks for asking!

• The workshop you are running at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol this July is about putting a story collection together. What will you be focussing on in this workshop?

We’ll look at the history of the chapbook as a starting point for digging into our own motivations for wanting to publish. We’ll reflect on my own and a range of other flash writers’ experiences so people can start to figure out what’s best for them. My goal is for people to go away galvanized, with an expanded awareness of the possibilities for getting their collections into the world and what to bear in mind when submitting. I want to embolden writers to make the choices that are right for them and their work. So this workshop is essentially like a massive heads-up to make sure writers aren’t just randomly throwing their words out there like a wedding bouquet for anyone to catch.

• You received an Arts Council Grant last year to write a novella in flash. How’s it going and what are you finding most interesting in writing in this form?

I’m starting to realise how satisfying it can be to linger in moments and how this is taking my writing to new places. The novella in flash form has given me an ‘in’ and enabled me to tackle a longer project, but I’m wondering if the story is now demanding to be told as a novella. I’ve just passed the half-way mark and have gone from fantasizing about how much to charge Netflix for the rights to thinking I need to start all over! I’ve heard this is an inevitable trajectory, so maybe this means I’m a proper long-form writer now.

• You’ve won first prize in other major competitions, including QuietManDave, Lucent Dreaming and The Forge prize for Flash Nonfiction, and have been listed or placed many times in others.What would you say was the most important thing to consider when submitting to a writing competition which receives hundreds of entries?

I rarely write with the explicit intention of submitting to a contest, so the stories I’ve submitted were things that had already been pressing themselves up inside me to be written and then the contest came up and seemed to be the right place at the right time. If a story doesn’t matter to me, it won’t matter to a judge. There has to be that emotional core. So, my advice would be to submit a story that took you by surprise, shook you up, led you to an unexpected place. Before I submit I will also consider the different ways my story might stand out to give me a chance. Does it perhaps tackle a theme I don’t see written about very often? Or does it have a unique setting which adds another layer of meaning or tension to the surface story? Does it take risks or try something new? Have I included unusual, resonant details? Ultimately, it’s about having the confidence in your own voice and telling a story in the way only you can.

July 1st 2025

Note: The 31st £1460 prize fund Award will be open for entries in the next few days and will close in early October this year. All fifty longlisted writers will be offered publication in our 10th anniversary anthology, out at the end of this year, or early next