John Brantingham was going to judge the February 2026 (32nd) Award but I’ve switched him to judge in October because circumstances mean February doesn’t work for him anymore. I am delighted and very grateful that Ingrid Jendzrejewski has agreed to step in at the last minute and judge for us.

Below,are some answers to questions I asked her about her writing, National Flash Fiction Day,UK, her projects and what she likes about flash fiction and looks for in competition entries.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski is a co-director of National Flash Fiction Day. She currently serves as the Editor in Chief of FlashBack Fiction, was a flash editor at JMWW, and has served as both non-fiction editor and editor-in-chief of the Evansville Review. She has published over 100 shortform pieces and has won multiple flash fiction competitions, including the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction. Her short collection Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping was a runner up for BFFA’s first Novella-in-Flash competition. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Vestal Review’s VERA Award, and multiple times for Best Small Fictions.

Q & A

• Thank you for stepping in at this late stage to judge our 32nd Award in what will be the first busy month for the team at National Flash Fiction Day, where you are co-director with Diane Simmons. I know you are not so involved with the anthology and the micro competition, but are very involved later on with FlashFlood and the Write-In. Can you tell us a bit more about those events and how they have evolved over the years?

Thank you so much for inviting me; Bath Flash Fiction is close to my heart, so being able to give back to the community in this way means so much to me. And yes, there’s a lot going on with National Flash Fiction Day which you can read more about here.
National Flash Fiction Day was founded in 2012 by Cally Ann Kerr, who then passed the baton to me and Diane in 2018. We’ve aimed to stay true to the project’s original vision of inspiring shortform writing and building a positive, encouraging flash fiction community whilst finding ways to grow sustainably as more and more authors embrace the flash fiction form. I’m thrilled to be a part of it all because National Flash Fiction Day provided some of my first publication opportunities when I was starting out.

FlashFlood is an unusual project in that there is only one week of submissions a year and then all the selected work gets published over the course of 24 hours with a new flash appearing every five to ten minutes on National Flash Fiction Day (scheduled for 13 June this year). It truly is a flood, both for the small band of volunteer editors and for readers alike! When I first came on board as an editor, the challenge was to make sure we got enough solid work to fill all the slots. Since then, the number of submissions we receive has exploded and even though we’ve nearly doubled the number of available slots, the journal has become much more selective…so much so that we now ringfence slots for debut flash writers to make sure we maintain space for new voices.

We also re-started The Write-In so that there would be another welcoming place for both new and seasoned writers alike. At The Write-In, we post multiple prompts during National Flash Fiction Day and writers have the weekend to draft a response and, if they choose, submit it to The Write-In for possible publication. We publish a selection of the responses in the days that follow. Our aim is to inspire new work and also create space for both new and seasoned writers to share their work. I participated in The Write-In when I was first exploring flash as a form, but it was discontinued soon after. When we decided to restart it, I wasn’t sure whether there would be enough interest to sustain the project, but I was blown away by the response and it continues to grow each year. We now publish a few hundred responses each NFFD week.

It’s worth noting that all of National Flash Fiction Day’s activities and sister projects are run by different teams of brilliant, generous, talented volunteers to whom we are ever so grateful.

• You won Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2016 with ‘Roll and Curl’, a story selected by judge Tania Hershman that I find very memorable and you also were a runner up in the inaugural Novella in Flash Award with your beautiful short novella, Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping. Just recently you won the online Flash Fiction festival November contest with ‘Swim’, a CNF piece, an equally memorable story about swimming. I am aware family matters have taken up much of your time in recent years but do you have any writing projects on the go?

I do indeed! I’ve developed the novella Skunk that was longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Award in 2023; that’s currently under consideration, alongside some other collections of flash and poetry. I’ve been slowly trying to rebuild my creative practice and write through some of the grief that I am just beginning to process. I’ve been writing a lot of haiku as well as shortform prose, and have even been dabbling with a somewhat-novel-shaped object.

During the pandemic, my sister wrote a short series How to Write When You Don’t Feel Like It for the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, which, after her cancer diagnosis, she adapted and shared with National Flash Fiction Day. You can read it here.I am finding her words of encouragement, compassion and inspiration such a gift.

• The workshop you run for the flash fiction festivals both online and in person are always inspirational. You add an incredible amount of resources on the subject you are teaching and use slide presentations very effectively. Is teaching and preparing for teaching writing, something you particularly like doing and have you any workshops coming up that people can join?

Thank you so much for the kind words! I absolutely love creating workshops and knowledge sharing with other writers. Honestly, I find the process incredibly valuable for myself as preparing for a workshop gives me an excuse to take a step back and spend some time really drilling down into aspects of craft, genre, style or structure that end up, I’m sure, benefitting my own writing and process. It’s so thrilling when I hear that a seed planted in one of my workshops has taken hold for someone…I often get more excited about a workshop-generated piece getting published than I do when my own work gets picked up! Writing can be a solitary pursuit, and there’s something absolutely magical about creative cross-pollination.

I’ve got a new workshop on Microfiction with SmokeLong Quarterly coming up here: https://www.smokelong.com/smokelongs-march-micro-marathon-2026. I’m also looking forward to giving an experimental workshop, ‘Writing with the Whole Body’ at the Flash Fiction Festival 17-19 July, 2026.Details about this will be posted at flashfictionfestival.com when the festival is open for booking next month.

• What excites you about flash fiction and what, for you, would make a standout entry?

I love the creative possibilities of the flash form. A short piece can carry all manner of experiment and play that might collapse or grow wearisome in a longer piece. And I love the craft and care required for such a compressed form. Flash combines the craftsmanship of poetry with the of storytelling — a gorgeous combination.

Personally, I love it when a flash takes risks, plays with form, delves into unusual territory, or pulls off that oh-so-difficult trick of writing a story that is both nuanced and joyful. Personal tastes aside, when reading for a competition, I try to approach each piece with fresh eyes and not front-load my reading experience with expectations: my aim is to let each flash speak for itself and guide my journey through it. I try my best to meet each piece on its own terms.

• The closing date for this round of BFFA is on February 1st. Can you give us favourite editing tips?

I’m a big believer in sticking drafts in a drawer to let them marinate for a while, then revisiting them with fresh eyes once one’s mind has moved on to other things. Whilst the occasional story drops onto the page nearly print-ready, the vast majority benefit from time and care. I often read really good pieces that I think could have been absolutely phenomenal with a little more attention…and I definitely have pieces of my own that I regret publishing too early.
That being said, when working to a deadline, anything that can get one to look at a story from a different angle can shortcut some of that waiting. Some tricks that can work well include having another person or the computer read the story to you out loud, printing out the piece in different onts or reading it in print or on a screen (whatever you do least), reading the piece backwards from the last sentence to the first, and rewriting the flash out by hand (as it forces you to slow down a bit and think about every word choice). With my own work, I find it valuable to do a pass through a piece in which I query every single word, sentence, paragraph break, punctuation mark, etc. and ask myself whether it is pulling its weight in the story, and whether it could be either deleted without regret or replaced with something better.

Finally, for me, I find it essential to read my work out loud — not just in my head — several times before hitting that ‘submit’ button. I have regretted it every time I’ve neglected this step!

• And if writers are going for a last minute, written from scratch, entry, what would you advise for them to attend to before sending off?

For last-minute entries, I think it’s even more critical to explore beyond the common themes…stories about death, abuse, cancer, dementia, break-ups, etc. are so common it can be hard to bring something completely new to these topics without some serious work.

A new idea about some off-the-wall theme can supercharge your imagination and give your writing wings…and can also be a real gift for your readers. I know that when I’m faced with a reading queue full of variations on dark topics, even if every single one is gorgeously written, nuanced, and perfectly structured, it can feel like such a treat to encounter a story about something completely unexpected – something about axolotls or tax preparation or solar rain, say – anything outside the box. Almost everyone has some sort of unique or unusual hobby, job experience, knowledge base or passion…I love it when writers use this material in their writing, telling stories that no one else can tell, either by introducing an unfamiliar topic or by approaching a common theme from an usual angle.

I’d also recommend leaving enough time to edit edit edit edit edit, and I think it’s worth spending however much time it takes to think of a title that works for and not against your flash. It breaks my heart when a story loses out because of a rushed title.

Thank you again for inviting me to read for Bath Flash Fiction, Jude. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what stories are in store for me…. Happy writing, everyone!

Stop Press: John was going to judge the February (32nd Award) but is unable now to judge this round and will now be judging our 34th Award in October 2026 instead. Read the new interview with Ingrid Jendzrejewski, who is now our 32nd Award judge

Thank you. It was a huge honor, and I was exposed to so many beautiful novellas-in-flash. I was absolutely overwhelmed by the talent. I don’t think I read a single bad one.

• You always have a lot of projects on the go. Recently you have been the recipient of the Gone Back to the Wild project in New York State to write 100 word stories about the wilderness in Western New York. Can you tell us a bit more about the project?. How is that going ? I think you have a couple of books being published that have arisen from it.

It’s good. The first book Gone Back to Wild is out. The second one Slowly through the Grove will be out soon both from Arroyo Seco Press. I’m grateful to the press and the New York State Council on the Arts. I’m writing 100 pieces for each book and each piece is exactly 100 words. The process draws out memories and emotions that I didn’t know I had. Basically I compose all of them as Italian sonnets and then slowly take them out of that form and transform them into prose poems or vignettes depending on the subject matter. That way they have a kind of underlying music, or so I hope.

I’m writing about the natural world of Western New York. When I say, New York, people think of the city. But I live in a rural community maybe 8 hours from the city. I’m near Pennsylvania in Northern Appalachia. Think maple forests and Amish people and corn farms. There are so few people here that I can wander the woods in joyful isolation and meditate. It’s a forest full of whitetail deer and bears and woodchucks. That’s what the collections are about, the meditation and radical wonder that comes with intentional isolation.

• Have you any new projects coming up?

I do. I’m working on a zuihitsu project, which is a Japanese form that’s hybrid prose and poetry. It’s essentially a journal that rambles. I’ve been rereading and studying the Romantic poets and artists in the UK and their influence beyond, and I’m writing about them in relation to Appalachia, trying to see beyond the stereotypes associated with this area. I’m not sure if your British readers are aware of those stereotypes, but this place and these people are often denigrated, but the beauty that universally exists throughout the earth in all people and places exists here as well, and taking the time to see it is an act of spirituality. That’s what I hope to accomplish with these pieces.

• We’d love to know about your different asynchronous classes on poetry, flash fiction levels one and two, memoir and building a career in the small presses. They sound very exciting and good value. Are the flash fiction ones suitable for anyone who hasn’t written flash before?

Yes, I have two levels of those classes, a basic class for people who have never written flash and a more advanced class for people wanting to write novellas-in-flash. I have video taped lectures with students and then we follow up with one-on-one personal manuscript reviews. I think people like the manuscript reviews the most. I love working with people, so please contact me if you’re interested!

• What, for you, makes a winning fiction of 300 words or less

An extraordinary point-of-view. We all have that, but we often don’t realize how our points-of-view are astounding to other people. The pieces that capture me are the thoughts of people I have never fully contemplated before. So they see a place differently from me or they understand a concept in a new way.

I love to show people my Appalachia for example and then have them show me theirs. What we get from that is a new vision and now entry into humanity. Its a way to develop my compassion and empathy. It’s what masters like Meg Pokrass, Pamela Painter, and you too Jude give to us.

• What do you think writers most need to pay attention to before they submit?

Blocking out all the voices who told them that the way they see the world is the wrong way. Often, I see well-crafted pieces that are essentially like work that came before. When I taught at a college in Long Beach California, unsurprisingly a lot of the students wanted to write like Bukowski because he was around. His voice often dominated their experience, but I didn’t want his experience. He was all right, but I was much more interested in seeing how they saw the world.

• As you are known for your interest in writing about nature, can you give us a nature based prompt to inspire a story writers might want to enter?

This is my favorite prompt: Write about the first time you can remember being outside by yourself. Do NOT write about the first time you were actually outside by yourself. Write about the first time that you REMEMBER it. If that was when you were 4 years old, great! If that’s when you were 68 years old, that’s equally good.

The 32nd Award closes on Sunday February 1st 2026

Thank you to our 31st Award Judge, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, for her excellent and detailed comments on her reading process and the winning stories

Judge’s report

Reading this longlist reaffirmed my belief that flash fiction writers are where it’s at in the literary world. The stories in this round popped with pitch-perfect prose and demonstrated a deep understanding of how form impacts story. There was something stand-out in every flash I read, and it was clear why they’d made it through to the longlist. Congratulations to all the writers, thank you for trusting me with your words, and thank you Jude Higgins for inviting me to judge and immerse myself in these story worlds.

There were so many stories in the shortlist which moved me, through gorgeous language, brilliant metaphor and imagery, or made me laugh at human behaviour and the state of the world or portrayed characters and relationships that felt authentic and relatable. It would be impossible to select only a couple for a special mention. I journalled for days. I dreamt about the stories. Ultimately, some started to dominate my notes and my dreams, some whose emotional impact refused to fade and which revealed new meanings on multiple readings.

First place: Two nude night-owls
Wise and understated, this story is a masterclass in how to depict yearning and suadade; an untranslatable Portuguese word which tries to pin down the feeling of nostalgia for a thing—or person— you’ve never had. ‘I miss you, but I haven’t met you yet’ sang Bjork. The narratorial voice lingered and pulled me back over and over. We open and it’s past midnight, literally and metaphorically in the narrator’s life. The unfolding scene is cinematic and dreamy. The story speaks to the peculiarities of our times. We are together but separate. We’ve never been more connected, never seen so much into each other’s lives, yet we’re living through an epidemic of loneliness. ‘We’ve never discussed a fence or planted a screen of shrubs…’ says the narrator who sees his neighbour swim nude every night. This is about the necessity of letting go, reinforced by the casual repetition of ‘whatever’ throughout the piece. Closeness to death is bringing a reckoning with what truly matters and the narrator’s realisation at the end is quietly devastating.

Second place: Vagina First<
The moment I’m conscious a piece is a breathless sentence it can pull me out of the story. In Vagina First the voice is so compelling, the cadence so perfect, the structure doesn’t draw attention to itself until it lands on that perfect beat. Nothing detracts from the tension between a daughter’s palpable excitement at leaving home and her mother’s struggle with letting go. The emotional impact is heightened because the mother’s actions are filtered through the lens of the daughter and with each detail casually relayed we feel in our bones the mother’s fierce, protective love. This writer also understands how to use comedy to help land a gut punch. Not enough that this mother wants to conjure up an image of a bear eating her daughter. She needs to ratchet up the stakes, and the timing of the phrase ‘vagina first’ is exquisite. It makes us laugh because it is unexpected, but also, I think, because it forces a moment of recognition of the crazy things love can make us say and do. This piece not only made me feel, but it made me think – of the man vs bear debate, of how patriarchal fascism comes for women’s rights first. Then, the final, crushingly sad image of the mother opens up a whole new layer of understanding.

Third place: My Husband Watches Henry the Donkey
This story is a skilful snapshot of the complex, divisive and absurd times we’re living though. In the future people will need to read stories like this to understand how it was possible we watched reels of donkeys as a form of solace. But we do. A sick body politic is making the couple in this story sick. With deft use of the rule of three, sentences starting with the verbs ‘Losing…Blocking…Avoiding’ reveal how the politics of division is insidiously seeping into their lives. But we see them doing what they can to resist despair, resist authoritarianism. This is a story about hope and where we go to find it. The light-touch humour in the dialogue imbues the relationship with a gentleness, which itself feels like a form of resistance; an antidote to a world where everyone is screaming at each other. Through great storytelling, (note the perfect mix of sentence lengths to create pace), this writer has created characters I love and I’m rooting for them, as much as for what they represent.

Highly commended: The Menopausal Woman and the Tsunami
This story is a gloriously sassy subversion of the misery-menopause narrative. I love these women, living their best lives on swan floaties getting wasted on gin martinis. This writer pulls off humour and makes it look easy with perfect comic timing and juxtaposition. I love that The Menopausal Woman is never named, neatly conveying the flattening of middle-aged women’s identities. The husband (who is named) remains off-page on the other end of the phone, and with a succinct reference to them as newlyweds, we see how a relationship changes over time. He’s not a bad husband, she’s just kind of outgrown him as she enters her zero-fucks era. These sisters have already faced down the tsunami that is menopause, so, whatever, get another gin and bring it on!

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

Thank you very much to Marie Gethins, our 30th Award judge, for her dedication to the task and for her great selections and insightful comments. Her comments on the stories are below. All the stories are published on this website and will be included in our 10th anniversary anthology, along with longlisted and shortlisted stories to be published later this year (or early next).

Judge Notes

Hitting that submit button is always an act of writerly courage and I applaud the spirit of all who entered this round of the Bath Flash Fiction Award. It’s been a privilege to read this rich array of flash. The fifty longlisted pieces revealed a wide range of approaches and areas of focus. Great to see historical, as well as contemporary, settings in the mix. Narrowing it down to twenty was difficult and winnowing it to the final five a true challenge. All stories were read and reread multiple times, mused over during long walks and a few even entered my dreams. Judging is inevitably a reflection of personal taste, writing/submitting often a test of perseverance. For those that didn’t make the final cut, keep going!

First Place: The City of Los Angeles is on Tactical Alert

The confluence of a sociocultural event with a deeply personal moment is deftly interwoven for devastating effect. Using anaphora for rhythm and emphasis, the author guides the reader on a relentless, emotional journey encompassing anticipation, joy, frustration, anger, fear and resolve. The flash reaps new rewards upon multiple readings. Precise word choice, mix of sentence lengths, and most importantly the careful thematic interlacing of public protest/law enforcement actions with differing parental response to a daughter taking her first steps results in a compelling final line: ‘This is all of us on tactical alert.’ A superb piece that is topical but destined to become a future touchstone.

Second Place: Psalm (After the Animals)
Beautifully framed by the protagonist’s well-loved, deceased dog, this lyrical and musical flash uses language to great effect with a powerful voice. The author conjures a mystical landscape with ‘moss that glows like bruised saints’ and ‘cedar tongues peel back from bark’. A full life is encompassed within a succinct, well-paced story that uses white space for excellent impact. Descriptions surprise and entice. The woman’s grief is palpable with the reader too welcoming the phantom dog’s return in ‘rainlight, tongue wild, eyes full of god’. A sacred song indeed.

Third Place: Revelation, 1859

An excellent title does a lot of heavy lifting here, settling the reader in time at the start, but adding nuance after the conclusion. The author skilfully provides a wonderful, atmospheric voice with historical vernacular for setting and era, while maintaining a clear storyline. Vivid descriptions place the reader in bed with the narrator during a storm, on the way to church and on the shore to witness the ‘revelation’. Lovely metaphors are sprinkled throughout: ‘thunder crashing loud as doomsday’, ‘grin as long as a flagpole, ‘teeth as big as bairns’. An intriguing historical flash.

Highly Commended: Negative

Negative considers grief with a husband’s response to his wife’s death via analogue photography. The concepts of light/dark and black/white are well wrought as the couple’s two sons try to navigate their father’s new hobby as his method of coping with loss. Yet, after his death the film negative strips reveal insights into their own grief.

Highly Commended: Awakening

Viewed through a child’s eyes, the flash relates the story of a mother’s grief after child loss and the father’s struggles to maintain family life when his wife disappears. An evocative conclusion with the narrator giving a mature observation of hope.

I have selected the longlist for our NIF Award since the inaugural year, 2017, reading over the past nine years, several hundred novellas. We don’t receive a huge number of entries (compared to the numbers who enter our three times a year single flash award). This year we received just over 80 submissions But I so appreciate everyone who has entered since our first award. Some writers have entered several times. It’s a difficult form to write and as someone who has written, but not yet completed several novellas-in-flash, I have learned a great deal from reading so many good NIFS.

This time, there were many inventive takes on the novella-in-flash form, some surreal and highly metaphorical, others with fragmentary structures, others with more traditional story telling. The subjects ranged widely. Many focussed on relationships in the wider context of today’s world including climate change and political events. Historical novellas, mainly set in the 19th and 20th centuries featured strongly and included strong dilemmas or shocking occurrences, which have relevance to today.

The novella-in-flash has evolved over the years since our first Award and some of the criteria for the form has altered over this time. Because including context is necessary for the flow of the story, not all flash fictions can stand alone as a story outside the novella. In my close reading I was, however, wanting what I call ‘a felt gap’ in between pieces. This could be a time leap, a different situation for the character, or a shift to another character’s perspective. At the same time, stories needed to have enough ‘connective tissue’ to flow, but not to flow seamlessly from chapter to chapter like a traditional novella. Each ‘chapter’ needed to feel like a complete flash fiction, rather than fragment or a traditional chapter. I am interested in the many variations possible in the the flash fiction form, and if experiemental flash forms (for eg, list stories, stories in letter form or revisioned fairy tales) worked with the story flow, I was happy to see them.

Judges of writing competitions frequently say it is the stories that stay with them which end up the top five. This was the case with me. I felt very involved with the characters in the winning novellas. I could strongly visualise where they were. I was moved. I rooted for them, hoping they could overcome obstacles, held my breath, wanted their lives to turn out well. I was drawn in at the beginning and felt satisfied with the endings.

I’m looking forward to seeing the top three novellas in print, published by our small press, Ad Hoc Fiction and launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in July, this year. Very best wishes to the highly commended authors for future publication and to all the authors with stories in our long and short lists. In the past many novellas entered for our awards have been published elsewhere and won prizes.

Here are my selections (and you can read the biographies of the authors on our winners’ pages)
!st Prize: In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit

I loved this novella on many levels. I liked its close focus on the life of a family in the USA in the 1960s and how they navigate day to day situations. I liked the POV, in the strong and believable voice of a young teenaged girl, and the way she thinks about her family and relates to them. The adults are flawed but believable too — a fearful grandmother who makes doom-laden remarks and has many strange habits, a self-preoccupied mother, a father who spends much time away from the home and an aunt who reveals secrets. We learn more about why the adults are like this as the novella progresses, sometimes via the aunt and often by the inclusion of ‘list’ stories, which add depth to the characters. It is clear the girl loves her parents and grandmother even though she longs for a ‘show family’ of the kind she sees on the television where they are happily together. The novella is moving, and also has humour — a great combination. The use of the rabbit motif threading through, adds a further depth. In the end, the family, in crisis, does pull together.

Runner-Up: The Lives of the Dead
Newly married Kate, is in an unequal relationship. Her husband holds a firm grip on their future, his hand literally holding tight on her wrist, causes small bruise marks and this motif continues throught the novella. He wants children immediately, would like them to have four, for her to be a stay-at-home mum. Kate wants a different future and struggles to find her own way through. The author has structured the novella brilliantly with Kate’s journey to self-realisation interspersed with re-visioned fairy tales. The fairy tales offer great depth to how the story unfolds and invite many reads to get their full impact. The interior focus of the POV shows Kate’s sometimes guilty struggles about motherhood and competing desires very well.

Runner-Up: Spin of the Triangle
This novella-in-flash tackles an important and difficult subject in a very skillful way. We are introduced to the different women who take part a baby-trafficking business. They are all vulnerable and have lived lives where they have been exploited in many different ways. The author shows the characters in the novella convincingly occupying each of the three roles in the victim, persecutor and rescuer triangle, at different times. In the end, we see that it may be possible for them to step out of moving around this triangle and have a different life. I was impressed by the individual stories in different POVs All aspects of the baby-trafficking business are covered, from the young girls manipulated to give up their babies, the grief of those who regret their choices, the office manager deadening her feelings with alchohol, the lies told about the babies’ origins. And in the background, the men who control it all.

Highly Commended: Playing With Fire
In this novella, we follow the journey of Jewell as she develops a career as a potter after the break up of her marriage, Jewell is an engaging protagonist who has the courage and determination to carry on and overcome obstacles to success. The author uses the different states of clay — Greenware, Bisque, Glaze, in the three different sections of the novella to show how Jewell progresses and this works very well. The dialogue between Jewell and the other characters is fresh and lively as are the titles of each short flash chapter, which further enhance the whole piece. Set in the US in 1980s, it gives a vivd portrayal of the times.

Highly Commended: Codewords
From the very first story in Codewords, the author gives us a vivid picutre in full sensory detail of life in Belfast in the 1980s/90s —during the time of ‘The Troubles’, The Northern Ireland Conflict, where day to day living involves people existting in deep fear of what might happen to them, from shootings,to knee-cappings, buses burning and bombs. Codewords shows the impact on various families, mainly through the voices of children, in an extremely powerful way. Adults talk in code, sometimes to try and protect the children. And this strategy echos through the novella in different ways. It’s hard for children to work out what the adults mean and sometimes even more frightening to hear half-truths. The mixture of what is said and what is not said is very effective.

Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash contest and Other Emergencies, forthcoming from Moon City Press in 2025. Her work has appeared many literary journals and anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation. Read in Full

It has been such a pleasure to sit with these fifty pieces over the past couple of weeks and to contemplate them through multiple reads. What I was hoping for was a nice variety of approaches and this is exactly what I got. There are pieces on the longlist that lean into the speculative, pieces that lean into the lyrical and pieces that bring the historical to life. There are pieces that made me think, pieces that connected with me on a deep emotional level, and pieces that made me laugh out loud. Flash fiction presents such a wide range of possibilities in terms of narrative, character, tone and form, and the writers of these pieces have made full use of these. I’m in awe of each and every one of them; the level of skill they demonstrate in these stories has made my job extremely tricky.
With just five pieces making it to the podium from hundreds of entries, the final decisions necessarily come down to subjectivity (a different judge in a different mood would have made very different choices) and the splitting of hairs (which went hand in hand with hair being pulled out and sighs being sighed). If I’d been allowed to, I would have picked a dozen winners, and it therefore feels right to celebrate some of those close-but-no-cigar stories before I get to my final five. One of the stories that immediately jumped out at me was “No One Can Figure Out How Eels Have Sex”—I love the way it braids together different elements in such a clever way. In terms of genre, I was wowed by “Hope Is A Four-Letter Word” for making me feel something real within the surreal landscape of a Zombie apocalypse; and I was similarly drawn in by the tense atmosphere of “Four for a boy.” I loved the humour in “6pm. Your BP is 190 over 110, and you are driving 15mph over the speed limit….” I loved the emotional power of “Try Again, Again.” And I will always think differently about mannequins after reading “Mannequin Body Parts.” Read in Full