What an honour (and a daunting responsibility!) to be invited to judge the Bath Award. As a writer and reader, I’ve always appreciated the wide variety of styles, structures and voices that can be found within BFFA anthologies. It’s such a great reflection of all the different ways we can play with flash fiction — but it certainly doesn’t help with easy decision-making, especially when you have to turn a list of 50 stories into 20, then five, then just three…

I find it impossible to pin down specific criteria for what makes a story “work”. It’s all subjective, and different pieces grab you in different ways — some with imagery, some with character, some with rhythm and rhetoric — so the process is really a case of reading, reading, and reading again to make sure my gut and my head were saying the same thing.

There are some wonderful, moving and well-written stories that didn’t make the shortlist (which is particularly difficult when you know another judge may well have weighed them differently), but the ones I chose all had something that scratched an itch in my flash fiction brain: a unique observation, an honest voice, clever experimentation, an unexpected perspective, a vivid snapshot moment, precise use of language, a feeling of being in safe narrative hands.

Choosing the winners and highly commended pieces was an even more agonising decision, which ultimately came down to how efficiently and entirely they managed to immerse me, how deeply I was able to connect with their characters, and how long the story lingered (even after reading it a hundred times over!). I hope you enjoy reading them — and all the anthology stories — as much as I did, and huge thanks to the BFFA team and everyone who submitted this round.

1st Prize: Corn Flakes Town is Burning

This was the first story I said “Yes!” out loud while reading, and it remained in my top favourites with every re-read. One of the huge challenges of flash is to create an authentic, complex world in a few hundred words, but this story manages to layer up so much backstory, subtext, and unique detail with an easy touch and a distinctive voice. The image of the diorama creates a vivid feeling of dissociation, focusing on the absurd mundanity of cardboard and lolly-sticks whilst in the depths of grief and shock. And I loved how every detail became a part of the scene: the curling edges of the envelopes foreboding what’s within; the curly-haired figure of Tim in the bakery (where the fire started); the silent screaming witnesses to the narrator’s world come tumbling down. This is my favourite use of magical realism: a way to express the inexpressible, turning a cereal box into a moment of deep emotional significance.

2nd Prize: To be Happy

The writer makes such precise work of characterisation here, encompassing both the narrator’s perspective and the father’s voice. I found a bittersweet stoicism in it that kept on surprising me. There’s no shying away from “the evils of the world”, or the pragmatic reality of the father’s decline, or the need to keep your keys between your knuckles to stay safe, but there’s also a profound gentleness and understanding in the shift of responsibility from parent to child, and the unspoken ways we show care and affection. What really struck me was the deft use of descriptive and rhetorical techniques: the father “startling another murder into the kitchen” with a stab of his “carpenter’s finger”; the calming radio “smoothing its skirts”; his “dog-head” jerk to check where she’s going. In such a sparse, efficient story, these unexpected language choices do such an effective job at drawing us closer in, behind the gruff exterior, to reveal the complex emotion beneath.

3rd Prize: South

It’s not easy to write an animal protagonist but I was utterly enamoured by this perspective of a fledgling bird preparing for migration. The choppy, chirping back and forth of voices. The details (“A barn near Bordeaux. Good beams. No cats.”). The growing anticipation and sweeping sense of movement (which I couldn’t help visualising in the animated style of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman). The overwhelming feeling of being lost in the flock and the tonal shift from exhilaration to exhaustion (“At dusk, we drop into thorny bushes trembling with strangers.”). And the interwoven repetition of dialogue between chick and Mam. It made me think about all the unseen spectacular feats of nature happening around us, as well as the terrifying reality of similar journeys made by displaced and asylum-seeking people, searching for a safe place to land.

Highly Commended:

The Other Side of Your Blanket

Another story that stuck with me through each round of reading for its originality and vivid imagery. What a clever, meta concept to take the reader (and the little Google man) on a tour through space and time, connecting the dots between past and present. I particularly liked the way each detail gradually unpicked the residents’ unreliable histories and unravelled the upstairs/downstairs subterfuge, secrets, heirlooms and heartbreak. This is exactly the kind of place my imagination transports me to whenever I’m wandering around a historical building, so it was a joy to embody the experience it in story form.

For Love

I can see myself using this piece as an example of an extremely effective “list” story in future writing workshops, as the way it handles pacing and escalation feels so effortless. I loved the rhythm created by its tongue-twisting linguistics (this one needs to be read aloud), the hyper-specificity of detail, and how quickly we move from comedy to tragedy and back again. The definition of a life flashing before your eyes — witty, bold, and delightful to the end.