The Novella-in-Flash Fiction is one of my favorite forms in the genre and it is truly exciting that more flash fiction writers are experimenting with it. Thank you to Bath Flash Fiction for creating this opportunity and providing the impetus. This is my second year of judging the Award and it’s been an honor to do so.
Read in Full
Jo tells us how she moved from writing her prize winning story 
in her head while driving, repeating the words out loud and then shaping the story on the page later. A busy writer, with all sorts of projects on the go, she is drafting a second novel with an interesting theme about survival in an apocalyptic world, has given herself the challenge of making 100 submissions this year and also co-runs the inspiring Writers’ HQ which gives opportunities, encouragement and support to writers from all backgrounds and income brackets. Whenever she’s lost for inspiration in her own writing, she always returns to Shakespeare and points out that reading Shakespeare, or “Shakey P” as she calls him “will tell you everything you need to know about writing”. Her other great writing tip for those wanting to enter Bath Flash Fiction Award is to find the “fundamental nugget of human truth in a story; something that resonates with a reader, almost on an unconscious level.” I am sure Shakespeare would have agreed with that.
Read in Full
Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award long list and many thanks to all who entered.
David Gaffney lives in Manchester, UK. He is the author of the novel Never Never (2008) plus the flash fiction and short story collection Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). The Guardian said ‘One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.’ He has written articles for The Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect Magazine and was judge for the 2015 Bridport Prize. His story ‘The Staring Man’ is featured in the 2016 collection Best British Short Stories, his new novel, All The Places I’ve Ever Lived came out in February 2017 on Urbane and his graphic novel with Dan Berry, The Three Rooms in Valerie’s head is out now with Top Shelf.
Thank you to everyone who entered the February round of Bath Flash Fiction Award. You kept our readers busy during the four months of the competition and as usual we had a deluge of entries at the end, which made it all very exciting. We received nine hundred and thirty-two submissions, from thirty-three countries:
Australia, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam
Stephanie Clement Photography
Consider my introduction to the following Bath Flash Fiction contest results as a kind of Thank You letter. A Thank You to the many contestants who participated, and to the staff who had to create the long list. But mostly this is a Thank You to the writers who listened. In my judge’s interview, I asked entrants to “Try to do something unique. Unique can mean using different subject matter, vocabulary, format, syntax, punctuation. Experiment a bit. Let loose. Find a story that has to be told. Make the judge forget the outside world for a moment.”
Read in Full
by Jo Gatford
Baby car seats, sometimes with babies in them, swiftly recovered. Nettles flourishing in the face of toilet breaks. Things said in anger and in tiredness, whipped free from wound down windows. Singular shoes. Houses turned into islands, refusing to bow to the bypass, clinging to their land. Roadkill; fox-ochre and badger-stripe and innards turned outer. And crows, wherever things are dead and forgotten. Shopping lists never fulfilled. Plastic bags, flocks of them, as everlasting as the old gods. GPS-related swearing. A horse, filthy white, the same colour as its hay, watching the traffic, dreaming of leaping three lanes to greener grass. Dozing lorry drivers, longwave sewn into their sleep. The shouts of children: Cows! Red car! Lions! Lions? No. Cows! The snap-shut replies of parents who should have stopped for a wee miles ago. Imaginary friends, abandoned because of older sisters who said they were babyish. Garden centres where time is liminal and space folds in on itself somewhere between the box shrubs and the trellis. Petrol stations, though never when you need one. Yawns no longer suppressible. A cigarette butt flicked through a window slot, its glowing ash streaking back inside to burrow into denim thighs. Traffic cones like shells for urban hermit crabs, crushed and dented, flashing silently into the night. A moment of lapsed concentration. A time when you wouldn’t make it home for Christmas, or the weekend, or at all. A time when these were Roman roads and the unexpected turn would not have existed. A time when all of this was nothing but fields. Car parts, tyre skids, blood spots, and perfect cubes of safety glass. The knowing sighs of EMTs. Roadside recovery phones standing at respectful intervals like neon orange sentinels. Angels, fallen, bewildered in concrete, wondering where all the souls have gone.
Jo Gatford is a writer who procrastinates about writing by writing about writing. Her debut novel White Lies won the Luke Bitmead Bursary and was published by Legend Press in 2014. Her short fiction can be found in Smokelong Quarterly, Litro, Aesthetica, PANK, Open Pen, The Fiction Desk and elsewhere. She is one half of Writers’ HQ – a writing organisation which offers online writing courses, workshops and retreats for ‘badass writers with no time or money’ – and swears at people on the internet for a living.
by Lee Nash
Everything conspired against him: the wind, first stealing the flames he’d kindled and torching his thatched cottage, then tearing away the corrugated iron roof of the home he’d built in its place; the Amazonian climate that finished his mother and sister; the mosquitoes and sandflies, maddening and everywhere. Everything and everyone: his business partner who walked; his long-suffering wife who at last set sail for Blighty, never to see him again, leaving Henry to his new conflict, a chain of coral islands off the coast of New Guinea; Queen Victoria and her version of justice. Still, he managed to pack those 70,000 seeds into the Amazonas, safely tucked between banana leaves, and now the wind was with him. Fast forward to the flames that clear the land in Malaysia and Myanmar, China and Cambodia, making room for neat rows of Hevea brasiliensis, to the demands of industry, the elastic bands and erasers, the half of all our tyres, engine belts, gloves, electrical wiring, emulsion paints and condoms – rubber smoothing and cooling us all the way. Fast forward once more to the infamous bio-warrior, carrying spores of South American leaf blight; with a nod to Mr Wickham he’s brought an ample supply and under a dubious guise. As the aircraft touches down, he bites on a rubber bullet, thinks of the Indian slaves castrated by the barons, the cash-rich labourers’ lust for cars, and welcomes the chaos that will ensue. With a measured pace, he walks his infested Wellington boots over the ripe plantations, clipboard in hand, while latex drips from the spiral scores into the waiting cups. The scarred trees recede in every direction; he flexes his leg muscles, still stiff from the flight, and starts to relax. The wind will do the rest.
Lee Nash lives in France and freelances as an editor and proofreader. She writes in a range of forms, with a fondness for haiku, haibun, sonnets and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in print and online journals including Acorn, Ambit, Angle, Magma, Mezzo Cammin, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The Heron’s Nest, and The Lake. Her first poetry collection, Ash Keys, is published by Flutter Press. You can find out more at leenashpoetry.com.
by Molia Dumbleton
Joey says his crispest memory of his mom is that ticky-ticky click-click-click of high heels on linoleum in the mornings and the clatter of plastic dishes and bracelets and curse words in the sink and her insistence that he hug her low and fast before she put on her pantyhose Jesus c’mon hurry now be a good boy because they’re expensive and runs were always blamed on him Goddamnit Joey even when he didn’t touch her legs not at all and all his trucks were in the other room besides.
The sound of those wind chimes she hung on the front porch still gets to him now he swears they put him in some kinda mood real fast whenever some girl he’s trying to go home with has them outside her apartment when they get there For fuck’s sake chimes you gotta be kidding me rubbing his nose in the way her sweet smoky smell used to go out the door with her into the cold air and into that loud car of hers down the road and away again an entire heart’s lifetime tick-ticking away in his chest before Mrs. Lewin and her big smell would get there to find him alone truck-handed and gob-faced at the plastic glass of the storm front door.
Molia Dumbleton’s work has been awarded the Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize; Columbia Journal Winter Fiction Award; Dromineer Literary Festival Flash Fiction Prize; and Kelly Barnhill Micro-Fiction Prize. She has been a Finalist for the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award; Indiana Review Half-K Contest; The Hemingway Society’s Hemingway Shorts Contest; and Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has also been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop and a Susannah McCorkle Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Stinging Fly, and others. She currently teaches at DePaul University and is a reader for The Masters Review.