Judges

Judge’s report, February, 2025 Award

Report from our judge, Sarah Freligh

There’s a famous story about United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, when asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, responded: “I know it when I see it.” I admit that I was hoping for the same regarding the fifty longlisted stories Jude Higgins sent my way: that the top five stories would magically present themselves with a trumpet fanfare and a chorus line of high-kicking dancers so of course I would know the winners when I saw them.

Truth is, it was a little (read: a lot) more complicated than that, especially when the entries felt so much like snowflakes, each of them unique and beautiful and entirely original in their execution. I read stories drawn from “real life” while others were anchored in a speculative world; stories that commanded attention from a fist punch of a first sentence and others that started quietly yet stealthily and accrued power and tension with each sentence. So no, I didn’t “know it when I see it,” but the five stories I’ve chosen out of the fifty on the longlist impressed me with their attention to craft and fealty to story.

I should say here that I’d be remiss not to give a shoutout to a couple of shortlisted stories I can’t stop thinking about, among them: The Body Is Capable of So Many Hungers (for its deep-dive into the many iterations of “hunger”), Breath and Bone (for its poignant exploration of obligation and love, even when its hard) and One Sugar (for its terrific narrative voice).

Writing about the short story, Edgar Allan Poe argued for the necessity of a “unity of effect,” i.e., how each choice an author makes during the drafting and revising of a story must be deliberate and intentional, in service to the story’s conflict, characters and themes. Ultimately, that’s the yardstick I used to decide on the five finalists. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

Highly Commended: Forgive Me Martha
I love how the author takes the convention of a confession, the sacrament of penance, and knocks it on its head. There’s just enough of the confessional to be recognizable here and yet the writer alters it in enough ways as to create something new and fresh. That’s evident from the very first sentence, with the “Forgive me Martha,” a conceit that’s held aloft until the final – wonderful!— word “Amend.” The point of view of a first-person narrator addressing another character can be such a high wire act, so easy to take a misstep and tumble into the land of exposition for the sake of the reader, but the writer avoids that by gradually raising the stakes of the narrative with each stated truth, alternately poignant and hilarious, eventually revealing the reason for what’s brought them here to the “confessional.”

Highly Commended: How to Fold a World Map
I’m a sucker for “how to” titles for the bit of mystery they present and the suggestion that the story will answer the implicit question that’s raised in the title. This one amazed and surprised me with its bit of misdirection in the first sentence, which is not the voice of instruction as so often is the case with a “how to” title, but something else altogether. The situation – someone from the ICU is calling – and the odd action—“. . . I was folding Mongolia” – is a knockout combination for a first sentence: a character, a conflict and a bit of mystery. Reading this, we come to understand that the act of folding those maps is a coping device for the narrator, actions that they repeat in order to distract and deflect them from situation in front of them: the unnamed “you,” a loved one in an ICU bed and their impending loss. It’s a stunning capture of a few moments in these characters’ lives, an intersection during which so much changes.

First Place: Like Dynamite

Of all the definitions out there of “story,” I think my favorite is that it’s “a container for change”—a requisite element for a novel or a standard-length short story, but so very hard to pull off in a micro of three hundred words or fewer. But my first-place choice, “Like Dynamite,” does this brilliantly with each and every word, image, action and – yes – even and most especially the punctuation. This writer understands the power of words, not merely their meaning in a sentence or an image, but the sounds and cadence of each and every syllable. Essentially, the story is one long sentence, but a sentence parceled out by semicolons, each phrase alluding to a different “time” and a different action in which these boys, Ben and Mark, try to obliterate themselves and their need. Rather than the breathlessness of no punctuation, the semicolons underscore the boys’ starts and stops, each try and fail, until the last “time” when “they sprinted clean past the parking lot and on down Rutger Road” and the prose, unfettered, rises and pushes us and them toward that amazingly powerful and haunting ending. Throughout this story, the anaphora of “the time” is a drumbeat accompanying the rising story arc, each time bringing them – and us – closer, closer to that inevitable end.

Truly, it’s like dynamite.

Second Place: Pack

Everything in this story – from the title to the last words – establishes and then supports the conceit of these teenage girls as something feral and predatory, something to be feared and obeyed or else: “our power a warning, a thirst, a howl echoing in the sky.” The title “Pack,” with its evocation of survival in numbers, sets the table so effectively for the feast that follows and the plural first-person point of view of the collective “we” is the perfect vehicle to drive that notion. Paired early on with verbs like “prowl” and “scuttles,” the reader is immediately dropped into a world of mock-or-be-mocked and each repetition of “we” and what they do to maintain their place in the pecking order raises the stakes and deepens and expands the characterization of this group. I love, too, how, in the last paragraph, the girls finally morph into animals with their “tuffs of down, thick as cream”—I swear I can smell the blood on their whiskers! Above all, there’s something universal at work here, something that speaks uneasily to the present day where cruelty rules and kindness is something weak, an underbelly to be attacked for its hopeful vulnerability.

Third Place: Eloise Writes as the World Burns

The title is such a fabulous tip-off to the meta-ness of this story, its allusion to the overriding theme of writer as god. I love how the first sentence of the story drops us immediately into this situation—a bomb is dropped “on the fictional McElroy farmhouse”—and reading this, we both witness and understand the ability of the “author”—Eloise—to wreak havoc or spare characters with a few cross-outs or keystrokes. There’s a sense early on that Eloise as author is in charge of this world—in essence, “playing God on paper”—which shifts into something else by story’s end, something that’s grown beyond her authorial control. A church is bombed and “she plucks the Browns’ youngest from the pew,” but despite sending “more ambulances, more fires brigades, more volunteers” . . . “the city still burns and burns.” The conflict, then, becomes the story itself and the author’s struggle to maintain control and direction of the story to the point where she “gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys” nightly and hides them in safe places, in “hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence” – a suggestion, perhaps, that at some point, our stories take the wheel and we, as authors, are just along for the ride.

Judge’s comments on 2025 Novella-in-Flash Award

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.

Q & A with Sarah Freligh: 29th Award Judge

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

Judge’s report October 2024 Award, by Matt Kendrick

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

Judge’s report on 27th Award by Michelle Elvy

Thanks very much to Michelle Elvy for all her work and great comments!

Winners and comments \
This was a rich set of flash fictions, and they required reading several times before the ones that stuck started to emerge – because so many were memorable. I kept thinking of the nurse on the ward, the boy in the car, the killing frost and the geraniums. I wondered about the coffee cup on the train, the gossiping crabs in the rock pool nursery.

The short list was made up of stories that sometimes circled and sometimes skewered the realities they examined. I was captivated by family drama, both loud and hushed; I was confronted by addiction and politics and cancer; I was swept away by imaginative dialogue, colourful, painted hearts and surprisingly observant seagulls. Some daring decisions were made, and I appreciated both the in-your-face approach to writing flash and the stories that required a gentle hand. Some reached, cleverly, to ideas and people familiar to us – faeries and rent hikes, Marlon Brando and Orson Welles – bringing them to the page with originality and flair. Some engaged parables and mystical imaginings. All of these decisions seemed deliberate, and the works on the short list delivered vivid imagery, sharp observation and carefully considered language. Some had beautifully memorable future-looking titles (‘The story we will one day never tire of telling you’) and some had wonderful images at the very end (‘her coat billowing behind her, like a galleon setting sail’).
And even as these flash fictions took on some heavy themes, there was also, sometimes, well placed – and much appreciated – humour. Perhaps just a hint, between breaths, but steady and sure.
A treasure of stories! I have so enjoyed considering the many virtues of all of them.

Highly Commended: The Bee
A story that delivers a whole lifetime in this small space, and brings remarkable detail – from the buzzing glory of angels to the everyday gleaming lawn mower. Here we have John and his entire family, and we see how life’s end may not result in a finality but is rather a moment in a series of intertwined moments. With such a simple title and point of focus at the start, the reader is tuned to nature’s precarious balance. This is a story that zooms in and out, with dynamic effect.

Highly Commended: Prognosis
A steady hand guides this story, and the second-person view connects the reader to a difficult moment, followed by the potential responses of anger, bafflement or denial. The reader sees this from the medical practitioner’s view, and we feel the push and pull between compassion and distance. All of this is delivered with care and close observation. There is tremendous feeling for the disorientation that occurs in the face of death, the tensions and intimacies, and some surprising moments. This is one of the gentlest stories I’ve read this season.

Third: On Friday Nights in May I Sit Quietly with a Friend

Reality delivered with a wry tone and a bit of magic. From the beginning, this is imaginative and expansive, looking beyond the park’s flitting insects and bounding dogs. The clever dialogue between narrator and faerie brings an original take to the internal sense of want and desire, and the bluebells as the central image, with their symbolic constancy, gratitude and love, sustains this sense of longing. There is a moment of wonderful humour as the flowers crumple in the narrator’s hands, and the faerie says, ‘Better keep trying’ – not a syrupy platitude about love but a matter of fact. Nature makes a soft backdrop – ‘the whisper of the leaves and ferns’ – but don’t be fooled: this is a marvellously delivered cautionary tale. And the last line is so effective, with its perfectly balanced phrasing and lingering question.

Second: Driving my Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab
A story so delicately told, if you blink you might miss it. With deceptively simple language, this story brings us into the world of a young person and his reality, and how the narrator is coping, or not. As the banter between the young nephew and the narrator continues, the layers of their story unfold. This dialogue gives the story forward momentum, but also keeps us grounded in the world that matters most: the future of this young person. This story is a memorable contemplation of frailty and resilience, and the tenderness that may exist between us, despite unwanted circumstances and burdens. The voice holds a strong narrative style, bringing into focus the tragic reality of human fragility, and the paths that lead to places where we might have to consider our own lurking truths. Powerful and unforgettable.

First: A Cock Among the BathersSo much to admire about this story! First, the forward-imagining sense of what will happen ‘tomorrow’. Second, the pacing – breathless and perfectly managed, maintaining a jaunty tone that uses repetition, imagery and play to keep us in the gallery, on the edge of our seats. Third, it’s a personal story with familiarity that pulls us into the space between the characters. This story is flash fiction fun, but it’s much, much more. Here we see a play on art – the very idea of an exhibition and what one might expect, or gain, from it. Here we are invited to frivolity and spectacle – the surface ‘look at me!’ moment that captivates and surprises (and maybe brings a flush to the cheeks). But this is also a summons to look again: there may be more here than meets the eye. The interplay between veneer and substance is built moment by moment. Besides all that, rich language and memorable phrasings add rhythm and pulse. I’ll not soon forget that ‘fur-tufted ass, cleft as a Cézannesque peach’. And I can still picture the retreat, with the operatic falsetto singing of love, or water. The title opens the scene among the bathers, and the last line is wonderfully surprising and satisfying.

Michelle Elvy, June, 2024.

Novella-in-Flash Award 2026: Judge: Jude Higgins

Jude Higgins is a writer, writing tutor and events organiser and has stories published or forthcoming in the New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Frontier, FlashBack Fiction, The Blue Fifth Review, The Nottingham Review,Pidgeon Holes, Moonpark Review, Splonk, Fictive Dream, the Fish Prize Anthology, National Flash Fiction Day anthologies and Flash: The International Short Short Story Magazine among other places. She has won or been placed in many flash fiction contests and was shortlisted in the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize in 2017, 2018 and 2023. Her debutflash fiction pamphlet The Chemist’s House was published by V.Press in 2017. Her micro fictions have been included in the 2019 and 2020 lists of Best Flash Fictions of UK and Ireland and she has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020, Best Microfictions, 2023, a Pushcart Prize, 2020 and Best of the Net, 2022. Her story ‘Codes To Live By’ was selected for Best Micro Fictions and was longlisted for Wigleaf in 2022. Her story ‘Spinning’ is published in Best Microfiction 2024. She founded Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2015, directs Ad Hoc Fiction, the short-short fiction press, co-runs The Bath Short Story Award, founded and directs the Flash Fiction Festival, UK, organises reading events and teaches flash fiction sessions online. Her full collection, ‘Clearly Defined Clouds’ is available from Ad Hoc Fiction

The 2026 Award

The 2026 Novella in Flash Award, this year judged again by me, Jude Higgins, is now open and will close on October 31st 2025. Results out in January 2026. If you are writing/or thinking of writing a novella-in-flash, here’s some information and FAQ’s. To help write and understand the form, we recommend reading Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: From blank page to finished manuscript Michael Loveday’s multi-award-winning guide on the subject. Read in Full

27th Award Judge, Michelle Elvy

We’re delighted to have Michelle Elvy back to judge the single flash fiction award again in the year that she is also judging the Fish Flash Fiction prize. Michelle judged our Novella-in-flash award in 2021 and 2022 and she first judged BFFA in June, 2016, when she selected Sharon Telfer as the first prize winner, for Sharon’s amazing historical flash fiction Terra Icognita. Read more about Michelle’s latest projects and writing services below and tips for writing great flash. Read in Full

Susmita Bhattacharya’s judge’s report, Feburary 2024

Our big thanks to Susmita Bhattacharya for being our 26th Award judge, and for her close reading and excellent comments on the amazing stories she selected.

Comments:
Judging for the Bath Flash Fiction has been an absolute treat, but it’s also been quite stressful! I’ve enjoyed reading all the stories, and I didn’t mind reading them multiple times. I actually enjoyed all my train travels these past couple of weeks because I carried these flash fiction pieces with me and they kept me company wherever I went. But it was stressful to choose the three winners and the two highly commended. I had no problem choosing some of them, but with a couple of them, I really, really had to ponder about which one would make it.

I’m in awe of the flash fiction pieces I read, the idea, the crafting of the story, the structure and how these stories got such a variety of reactions from me. A sharp intake of breath, a few tears, a nodding of the head, a smile. When I read the winning story for the nth time on the train, and wiped my tears, the person sitting opposite looked at me uncomfortably. I so wanted them to read the story and cry with me.

All the entries are such excellent pieces, so congratulations to everyone who made it to the longlist, then the shortlist and then the winners, of course. And congratulations to everyone who wrote a story and submitted it. And congratulations to everyone who wrote something. Read in Full

John Brantingham’s report on Novella in Flash 2024

Thanks very much to John Brantingham for judging our 2024 Award, and for his encouraging general comments as well as the specific remarks about the winners listed below. John is a big fan of the novella in flash, having also written several himself and we absolutely agree that all these novellas should be out in the world.

You can also read John’s previous comments on the longlist and short list and read more about the winners and commended below. As stated in our Award details, Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing the top three this year Hereafter,the first prize winner and the runners up, Nose Ornaments and Marilyn’s Ghost.

John writes:

I am thrilled with all of the novellas-in-flash in this year’s contest. Each of these had diverse subject matter, styles, and approaches to fiction writing, but I loved that each of them used the novella-in-flash form to help distill what they were saying about the world. In addition to this one unifying element, they also all dealt with those most powerful moments of the human experience. They dealt with issues like breaking with the past as one moves on into the future, how to negotiate life in a small town, grief and loss, thoughts of suicide, and the way society constructs and deconstructs fame.
As with last year, I would encourage any of the writers whose work I read to find a publisher for their work. These were all interesting and innovative, and the decision for the final choice is to some degree subjective. I can say that I loved reading all of them. I would have bought them had they been on a shelf in a bookstore.

Highly Commended
The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face
The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face is a fascinating novella about a man who discusses the endless abuse and self-harm of toxic masculinity and staying closeted that leads to self-harm. This work contains an interesting intrusive narrator who not only presents the story but also provides commentary on what was happening and the greater meaning of it all in terms of how the main character views the world and is handled by the world. He still keeps us at a bit of a psychic distance, which is the perfect place to keep up because otherwise it would turn pedantic. It is not just a strong novella-in-flash, but the stand-alone stories have self-contained emotional catharses that are moving in their own right.

Highly Commended
Nine Inches of Rain
Nine Inches of Rain is a historical novella-in-flash set in August of 1952 when a storm ravages a small town. Aside from any other considerations, the story of how a group of people deal with and live through natural chaos is compelling. The characters and their reactions are human and telling. However, Nine Inches of Rain uses the novella-in-flash form to explore what life in 1952 in the United Kingdom outside of London was like. It looks at the values and interpersonal relationships of the people in this world.

Runner Up
Nose Ornaments
Nose Ornaments follows the lives of three generations of Indian women as they migrate from India to Arizona. It looks at the Indian diaspora during a time of quickly shifting norms for women, and each generation finds that it needs to break free from the traditions of the previous generation. By using multiple generations, the author is able to bring humanity not only to the women as they free themselves from social norms, but also to show how disconcerting it is for a person of the previous generation to watch as her daughter acts in a way that doesn’t make sense to the mother.

Runner Up
Marilyn’s Ghost
Marilyn’s Ghost is a fictionalized account of the death and days following Marilyn Monroe’s death. It is a discussion not only of the characters in the story but also the social mores that surrounded the icon and our understanding of her. The shifting point-of-view helps us to understand who she was and how people projected their fantasies upon her. Just as important is a shifting style and approach to narrative. The author uses as many different ways of storytelling as possible in this short novella-in-flash. Each of them helps us to understand a different aspect of what the writer is suggesting about Monroe and our understanding of her.

Winner
Hereafter
Hereafter is a powerful novella-in-flash about the nature of grief. A woman loses her child when he’s young. There is no one there for her and those people who should be part of her support system, mother and partner and others, are either missing from her life or so critical of it and her that she might as well be alone. So she has to find a way to live and survive without the help of others. Hereafter is also a discussion of what it is for a woman to grow and feel invisible in a culture obsessed with sexualizing youth. What stands out as one of its achievements of Hereafter is the way that the main character doesn’t experience grief in a linear fashion or predictably. Years later, she’ll be reminded of what she lost and will be drawn into the pain in unexpected ways depicting the way that grief functions in a realistic way.

Susmita Bhattacharya, judge for 26th Award, Feb 2024

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born British writer. Her novel, The Normal State of Mind, was published in 2015 by Parthian (UK) and Bee Books (India) in 2016 and was long listed for the Words to Screen Prize, Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) Film Festival in 2018. Her collection of short stories, Table Manners, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018 and won The Saboteur Prize for the Best Short Story Collection in 2019. She teaches contemporary fiction at Winchester University. She was Writer-in-Residence at Word Factory in 2021. She is a regular workshop presenter at the Flash Fiction Festivals UK. She lives in Winchester.

Thank you for agreeing to judge our 26th award that closes in February 2024.
You write novels, short stories, poetry and flash fiction. Do you find in your writing that you switch easily from one form of writing to another?

Flash Fiction Festival!

What do you like about writing flash?

I love flash for the immediacy, the sense of urgency in a story. It’s punchy and experimental, and although it could be even 100 words long, it’s no easy feat to create a narrative in those many words which has a plot, character development, emotions, conflict and a punchy that often leaves the reader breathless. It’s a great challenge and to achieve a successful flash fiction requires great skill. I love the flash community as well. Most flash fiction writers are very supportive and enjoy being part of the community without being to competitive. There’s a lot of encouragement to keep writing flash, and lots of events that help this community to grow.

Recently, some of your short stories were broad cast on BBC radio. Was that under a special theme and is there still a link to listen to them?

Table Manners

listen to it here.

You are an associate lecturer in Creative Writing in Winchester and have taught workshops and courses in numerous places, both for adults and young people. What upcoming events are you involved in?

You have been a professional writer since 2005. Can you tell us some of the highlights of your career so far?

But the true highlights that I will hold dear to me are the little things: readers appreciating my work, readers reaching out to me to let me know my words have moved them. For example, finding someone reading my novel in a hospital waiting room was a highlight! A terminally ill friend of my husband’s parking his car to ring him, to let him know he’d just listened to my radio essay about cancer and how much that had resonated with him that meant so much to me. A Year 2 child in my children’s school where I used to work as a dinner lady would stop me on the way to lunch hall to give me ideas for my next book. (They’d been shocked when I had visited their class to talk about writing and shown them my book! They had said, you’re our Dinner Lady. And I had said, Dinner Ladies can do loads of other things outside of the lunch hour!) My daughter forgetting her reading book in secondary school, and her teacher fishing out a book from her bag to give her to read. ‘It’s your mother’s book,’ the teacher said. ‘Have you read it?’ ‘No,’ said my daughter, probably embarrassed at all the attention she would now get. Then all her classmates googled me, and she came home, saying, ‘mum, you’re a celebrity! Google recognizes you as a writer!’ That made me chuckle! Being invited to Cardiff University to talk to MA students about my writing journey has always been special. It’s always a ‘this is where it started, this is how it’s going’ experience! These are some highlights I will remember fondly and forever!

Finally, as our judge, can you say what sort of story would stand out as a winner for you?

For me, a flash fiction should immerse me in the story. It should feel immediate and also layered with meaning. It should leave something for the reader to work out, or have a moment of epiphany at the end. It could be a story about a theme without mentioning the theme. Think about Hermit Crab style or other ways of approaching a story. The story should make me wake up in the middle of night, still worrying about the characters, or trying to work out how they could work out the stuff they’ve been put through. A standout story would involve me as a reader, and make me care intensely for the character/s. In cricketing lingo, a story should not target the reader head on, give me a good googly ball – a sudden spin that will get you if, as a reader, you’re not ready for it!