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The Best Small Fictions 2020 Nominations

Each year, we nominate the full quota of five flash fictions for the prestigious The Best Small Fictions anthology from our winners selected by judges in our thrice-yearly Awards. For 2020 we are delighted to nominate ‘Candy Girls‘ by Christina Dalcher, the first prize winner chosen by our February 2019 judge, Vanessa Gebbie, ‘Cleft’ by Gaynor Jones, the first-prize winner chosen by our June 2019 judge, Christopher Allen, ‘Angie’ By Marissa Hoffmann, the first prize winner chosen by our October 2019 judge, Nancy Stohlman, ‘The Wild West’ by Francis McCrickard second prize winner chosen by Nancy Stohlman from the October 2019 Award and ‘Snow Falling Upwards‘ by Fiona J Mackintosh, chosen by Vanessa Gebbie from the February Award. All stories as well as being published online on this site are also published in With One Eye On The Cows our own yearly anthology, now published by Ad Hoc Fiction, which will be launched in Bath,Saturday, 8th February and is available to buy from our Ad Hoc Fiction online bookshop

It’s also a privilege to be able to nominate five winners from our sister Award, the Ad Hoc Fiction micro contest from the winners voted for by the public in 2019 and published on the winners’ pages of Ad Hoc Fiction. We have chosen, ‘A Mad Max World’ by Syliva Petter, ‘Time Will Say Nothing But I told You So’ by Alison Woodhouse, ‘Lunch at Luigi’s’ by Linda Grierson-Irish, ‘Push’ by Henry Barnes and ‘White Noise Playlists at St Bernadine Medical Center’ by Charles Duffie.

Best wishes to all our nominees. We love all your stories! The Best Small Fictions 2019 is published now. It’s a beautiful book and we are thrilled one of our last year nominees, Fiona J Mackintosh has her first prize winning story, ‘Siren’, published within it.

2019 Flash Fiction Highlights

Thank you so much to everyone in the world-wide flash fiction community who supported all our enterprises in 2019 and helped them thrive. It’s really been a great year for Bath Flash Fiction. We ran three more successful single flash fiction awards, our third novella-in- flash award, our third Flash Fiction Festival, hosted several reading events and Ad Hoc Fiction, our fantastic short-short press, published twelve new flash fiction books pictured above, which are all available to buy from the online bookshop in several different currencies. And, in a first for Ad Hoc Fiction, the everrumble by New Zealand based author, Michelle Elvy first published in the UK in June, 2019 and launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, is now published and available to buy in New Zealand. More details on our year-in-flash below:
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Interview with Dan Crawley, author of the novella-in-flash, ‘Straight Down The Road’

Straight Down The Road , Dan Crawley’s novella-in-flash, highly commended in the 2019 Novella in Flash Award by judge Michael Loveday, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction a few week’s back and is available to buy in several different currencies on the Ad Hoc Fiction online bookshop.

This is what Michael wrote about Dan’s wonderful evocative novella: “As if it were some rediscovered Raymond Carver manuscript, this is a classic novella-in-flash in the mainstream American tradition. A working class family try to keep themselves afloat, travelling the country by car after the father quits his job. The writing is warmly affectionate towards the characters although they’re flawed. There’s an appealing, breezy, summery quality even though real tension bubbles up – it feels like an authentic family dynamic. Some bond of grudging love keeps this family together, when they’re stretched to breaking point. Each flash has the clarity of a distinct memory – like each one might be a family legend. A vivid and highly effective novella-in-flash.”

In our interview below, Dan tells us more about writing his novella, gives some tips to those who are finalising novellas for the 2020 Award which closes in mid January 2020 and describes his day to day writing process, his current projects and who he might cast in a movie of ‘Straight Down The Road’. We’d love to see a movie of this story!

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Nomination Time!

It’s that time of year again and we’re getting in our BestMicro Fiction and Pushcart Prize nominations at the last minute.

This year Best MicroFiction is just accepting micros from online publications/magazines not print anthologies so we are very happy to nominate four of the 2019 winners from the Ad Hoc Fiction weekly micro competitions. Congratulations and Best wishes to the authors of the four stories! You can read all of them on the Ad Hoc Fiction winners’ pages (under Adhoc Fun).

Best Microfiction Nominations
‘Booted’ by Linda Grierson-Irish
‘This is Why Grown-ups Buy Torches’ by Richard Kemp
‘The Night the Fishmonger’s Van Reverses into the Youth Club Pop-Up Disco and Shifts Debbi”s World’ by Louise Mangos
‘Time Will Say Nothing But I told You So’ by Alison Woodhouse

We’ve selected our limit of six Pushcart Prize Nominations from the three single-author collections our small press Ad Hoc Fiction, published this year: Finding A Way by Diane Simmons; All That is Between Us by K.M.Elkes and the everrumble by Michelle Elvy and the three first prize winners from our 2019 Bath Flash Fiction Awards. Congratulations and Best of luck to all six authors. You can buy the single author collections on the Ad Hoc Fiction online bookshop and on Kindle. And read the Bath Flash winners on this site on the winners’ pages.

Pushcart Prize Nominations:
‘Six Months Yesterday’ by Diane Simmons
‘The King of Throwaway Island’ by K.M. Elkes
‘Pressure Drop or: Sea World, August 1971, Part 2’ by Michelle Elvy
‘Candy Girls’ by Christina Dalcher
‘Cleft’ by Gaynor Jones
‘Angie’ by Marissa Hoffmann

Nominations for Best Small Fictions coming later on

Interview with Santino Prinzi, Judge for February 2020 Award

Santino Prinzi is a Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day in the UK, is one of the founding organisers of the annual Flash Fiction Festival, and is a Consulting Editor for New Flash Fiction Review. He writes flash fiction, prose poetry, and is currently working on a novel. His full-length flash fiction collection This Alone Could Save Us is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction. His flash fiction pamphlet, There’s Something Macrocosmic About All of This (2018), is available from V-Press, and his short flash collection, Dots and other flashes of perception (2016), is available from The Nottingham Review Press. His work has been selected for the Best Small Fictions 2019 anthology, and he has received nominations for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, the Best British and Irish Flash Fiction, and the Best Microfiction anthology. His stories have been published or are forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Jellyfish Review, 100-Word Story, Bath Flash Fiction Award anthologies, National Flash Fiction Day anthologies, Reflex Fiction, and others. Twitter (@tinoprinzi)
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13th Award Round Up

Thank you to everyone who entered our 13th Award, regular entrants and new comers. We very much appreciate your support. It helps to create the buzz around flash fiction and we are sure, year by year, more people are writing and reading very short fiction. This time our entry numbers increased to 1180; stories received from forty one countries:

Australia, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cook Islands,Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominica, France, Germany, Greece, HongKong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Senegal,Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden,Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

We released our fifth badge for the ‘fun’ last minute club. Numbers of entrants going up to the wire did not disappoint. It was busier than ever. If some one can explain the psychology behind entering on the last day, please tell us. This time, the winner lives in Switzerland, the second prize winner lives in France, the third is from the UK, one of the commended pieces is by a northern Irish writer living in the USA and another is from a writer who lives in Australia. The flash fictions are all very powerful pieces and we are happy to publish them on this site for you to read and shortly in our year-end anthology, which will contain writers from the three longlists of the 2019 Awards who have accepted our publication offer.

Thank you very much to our intrepid band of initial readers who dedicate many hours of time reading through the entries and particularly on the last weekend when so many stories come in. And also thank you again to Nancy Stohlman, who read the longlist with such enthusiasm, and despite it being a very hard job to choose, selected the winners and commended pieces within in our fast turn around time and wrote interesting and insightful comments on the long and short lists and on the winning pieces.

The 2019 anthology will be launched in Bath in January/early February. Everyone listed in the three Awards who accepted their publication offer, will receive their free copy published by Ad Hoc Fiction by the end of the year.
Our next Award, judged by writer, editor and co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK, Santino Prinzi will open on November 1st 2019 and close on February 8th 2020.

We look forward to receiving your entries and reading many more great flash fictions.

October 2019 Short List

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award short list.

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October 2019 Long List

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award long list and huge thanks to all who entered.

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Interview with Debra A. Daniel, author of ‘The Roster’, highly commended in the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award, 2019

The Roster by Debra A. Daniel was published in June this year and launched in the UK at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol. Our 2019 judge, Michael Loveday, had this to say about the novella:

This “ensemble cast” novella has a fresh and original concept — a sequence of stories about a teacher’s pupils at a school, more or less one story for each pupil. The students’ eccentricities, rebelliousness and vulnerabilities are depicted with warmth, fondness, and very often, an absolutely heart-breaking poignancy, as in the case of the child with brittle bones, or the young boy grieving his sister. There is black humour too, in places, and endings that are intensely lyrical. The characterisations are superbly individualised, vivid, inventive and memorable, and are written with beautiful variety of expression. A novella-in-flash of immense charm that has real emotional substance.

Debra has also launched the novella in the US now. The pictures in this post are taken at one of her launches and we’re thrilled that her husband, song writer Jack McGregor, recorded three songs based on characters within the book, which you can listen to here, on sound cloud.https://soundcloud.com/jmcgregor/sets/the-roster You can buy the novella directly in paperback in several different currencies from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop.Our 2020 Novella Award is open for entries now until mid January 2020. Read Debra’s excellent tips on writing one at the end of this interview with her. Read in Full

‘All That Is Between Us’, Interview with author, K. M. Elkes

We’re holding the Bath launch of All That Is Between Us by K. M. Elkes on 28th September, 7.30 pm – 10.00 pm, at St James’ Wine Vaults in Bath at our celebration evening of flash fiction readings. It is a wonderful collection which was first launched into the world at The Flash Fiction Festival at the end of June this year. It’s interesting to hear how Ken put the book together and what he says about his own writing style. And the picture below shows Ken’s selfie in front of a happy festival crowd. We looking forward to hearing more stories from the book at the readings in Bath so do come. And you can read more about the collection here in a previous post and buy from the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop.

Interview – K.M. Elkes

Writers are always interested in how authors decide on the sequence of the fictions in a collection. Will you tell us how you arrived at yours?

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