Q & A with Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, judge, 31st Award

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

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Novellas-in-Flash by Fiona McKay and Stephanie Carty Now Up for Pre-order

Two more novellas-in-flash published by Ad Hoc Fiction are now available for pre-order at a 25% discount until publication day on 6th July!

The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay and Spin of the Triangle by Stephanie Carty were runners-up in the 2025 Bath Novella in Flash Award. Read more about the authors here We’re excited that both novellas will be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival 18th-20th July in Bristol, along with the winning novella, In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit by Debra A Daniel, also available for pre-order until July 6th.

The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay
“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” – Jude Higgins, Judge, 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Novella in Flash Award.

Spin of the Triangle by Stephanie Carty
“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”.
Jude Higgins, Judge, 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Novella in Flash Award.

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Round-up: June 2025 Award

We love the results of the June Award coming three weeks before the Flash Fiction Festival where so many flash fiction fans gather to celebrate the short-short form.

For this round we received 999 entries from the following 35 countries:

Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States

Thank you to all of you. We appreciate all of you for your support. The Last Minute Club badge, issued to last day entrants reflected the colours on the cover of the 2024 Bath Flash Fiction Award Anthology, recently published after a delay. As usual there were many writers who entered at the last minute and received their badges. Thank you to the earlybirds and the many others who entered before the final deadlines. We appreciate all of you for your support.

Our big thanks also to to Marie Gethins for judging th 30th Award, choosing the short list of twenty from our longlist of fifty and selecting the winners. Read Marie’s report to see comments on the longlist she received and how immersed herself in the stories and read and re-read the stories before coming to her decisions all marvellous stories:

This time round, three different countries were represented among our five winners.
First prize winner The City of Los Angeles is on Tactical Alert is by Alison Powell from Somerset in the UK
Second prize Psalm (Among the Animals) is by Joseph Randolph
Third prize Revelation, 1859 is by Sharon Telfer, from Yorkshire in the UK
Michelle Wright from Australia is highly commended for ‘Negative’ and Christine H Chen from the US is highly commended for ‘Awakening

All stories along with those by shortlisted and longlisted writers will be published in our 10th Anniversary Anthology, out at the end of this year or early next.

The 31st Award, judged by award winning writer and writing tutor and one of our previous first prize winners, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, will be open tomorrow July 1st and will close in early October.

We look forward to reading your stories.

Jude Higgins, June 29th 2025

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Judge’s report, 30th Award, by Marie Gethins

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.

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Alison Powell, First Prize, June 2025

The City of Los Angeles is on Tactical Alert

by Alison Powell

This is our daughter’s first step. This is a preliminary step. This is her on her feet. This is proactive. This is freedom. This is working to tackle the issues. This is transitional. This is a special force. This is our daughter standing unaided. This is a team trained to handle situations beyond the capabilities of ordinary law enforcement. This is pivotal. This is a high level of violence. This is crucial. This is the controlled redistribution of on-duty personnel. This is finding balance. This is an obstacle in the way. This is a glance for confirmation that yes, she has found her vertical. This is a response to a major incident. This is me grabbing your wrist and urging you to: Look! This is city wide. This is you locked into your screen. This is a result of low-staffing. This is our daughter smiling. This is due to disruption. This is you not responding. This is in response to a protest. This is in response to her unaided standing. This is a response to anticipated looting. This raised voice is my response to your lack of response. This is a heightened level of response. This is your glance in the wrong direction. This is a response where officers can be kept on past their shift end time. This is inattention to what is important. This is a force being moved around between divisions. This is your daughter falling. This is a precursor to a mobilization. This is you missing the moment. This is intervening in high-risk situations. This is our daughter crying. This is a stun grenade. This is violence. This is tear gas. This is too much. This is suspicion of assault. This is a protest. This is a protest. This is all of us on tactical alert.

About the Author

Alison Powell is a writer and teacher who believes the world is a better place when we allow ourselves to create. Her fiction has been long- and short-listed in numerous contests (Mslexia, Writer’s HQ, Reflex and TSS amongst others) won the local author prize in the Bath Short Story Award and runner-up places in Flash 500 and the Bridport Prize. She co-edited the 2018 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and has been published in a growing pile of anthologies, magazines and online publications. She runs writing workshops through her venture WriteClub and supports a global community of writers. Find her on Insta/FB: @hellowriteclub or via www.alisonpowell.co.uk

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Joseph Randolph Second Prize, June 2025

Psalm (After the Animals)

by Joseph Randolph

The dog’s been gone ten winters, bone-vanished, creek-gnawed, myth by now—and still she calls it, not namewise, but gutward, where grief nests in a pit of salt. Not loud. Just in the throat, just enough to reopen the place where language scabs.

She descends the hillpath in hush rhythm, soles clagged with rainrot. Cedar tongues peel back from bark like old liturgy. The girl—not girl, not since the orchard wound her dress to thorn, not since the thigh-bloom and afterward hush—walks with the gait of someone who remembers too well how her body once believed it was chosen.

In her hand: rotwood, soft as marrow. In her mouth: the silence after a name is unsaid.

The boy—who laughed into her thigh, who said stay like a psalm cracked sideways—did not stay. He unbecame. Became ash-tray name, pubside rumor, verse in a cousin’s wedding toast.

Now she counts mushrooms like relics. Haloed under bark, pale as skin under first frost. Each one a failed gospel. Each one waiting.

A hawk calls overhead, the cry sounding like punctuation to a sentence she never finishes. She does not look up. The sky has become impassable.

She kneels by the old stump, dog-shaped in memory, ringed with moss that glows like bruised saints. Her palms find the wet wood. Her lips open.

Not prayer. Not name. Older than that. What came before names. What Orpheus forgot to sing.

She presses her forehead to the stump and waits.

Waits.

Waits for the wound to reopen. For the hill to remember. For the dog to come limping back through rainlight, tongue wild, eyes full of god.

About the Author

Joseph Randolph is a writer and artist from the Midwest working in prose, poetry, painting, and experimental music. His books include Vacua Vita, Sum: A Lyric Parody, and The End of Thinking. His debut novel, Genius & Irrelevance< is out for publication. Music is streaming; paintings are on Instagram @jtrndph.

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Sharon Telfer, Third Prize, June 2025

Revelation, 1859

by Sharon Telfer

All night the roof rattling like Old Nick himself’s dancing hobnailed cross the tiles, thunder crashing loud as doomsday, but us clammed safe in our beds, thanking the good Lord for sending such a storm at Eastertide, the cobles hauled up on the strand, trussed tight as chickens, each man counted, ganseys steaming by the last of the Saturday stove, my boys in their steady bunks, my Frank’s arms lashed fast around me not wrestling lines in some gale blasting the deep.

And morning comes, still as milk. We busy ourselves to the harbour, turned out neat and ready for hymns and hallelujahs and ‘He is risen’, the waves right where they should be, no surge up the slipway, the floor bone-dry in the Anchor, the well drawing sweet, all smiling and blesseds and handshakes, when Braithwaite’s lad, him that’s too simple to handle the nets but who can no more lie than he can tie a knot, staggers panting up the beach, sand-speckled as a pollock, yelling to shift ourselves for the Beast were risen out of the sea and the days of Revelation were upon us.

So over the breakwater we clamber, never minding our Sunday best, fret spitting in our eyes, until we are stopped, gawping: the great slab fallen, the tall rowan toppled to anemone, roots grasping at air, the shale still skittering, the monstrous marvel of it, that dreadful tail and dragonish claw, grin long as a flagpole, teeth big as bairns, crawling from what ancient darkness?, and Frank’s hand cannot warm the doubt chilling my spine, even the wheeling kittiwakes dumbfounded to silence, and nothing to hear but the shush of a tide going out and the chapel bell stuttering at the top of the torn and barefaced cliff.

About the Author

Sharon Telfer’s flash fiction has won prizes including the Bath Flash Fiction Award (twice) and the Reflex Fiction Prize. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. Her flash fiction collection, The Map Waits, is published by Reflex Press and was longlisted for the 2022 Edgehill Short Story Prize. She lives in the Yorkshire Wolds, in the north of England.

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Michelle Wright, Highly Commended June 2025

Negative

by Michelle Wright

Seven months after Mum’s death, Dad bought a 1968 Leica and turned their ensuite into a darkroom.

“A positive sign,” said my brother.

Until then, during our weekly visits Dad would slump in his recliner, speaking in monosyllables; mostly sitting in silence. Now he locked himself away, developing black and white images of the strangers he photographed on suburban streets. He hung the strips of negatives from clothes lines strung across his bedroom. They formed long bars of faces, like a curtain we could see through but couldn’t cross; like the plastic strips hung in doorways to keep out flies.

Before we left each Sunday evening, we’d stand in the hallway to say goodbye. He wouldn’t answer, but we’d see his face behind the negatives, his eyes straining through the black and silver shapes. We weren’t sure if he even printed the photographs. We never saw them anyway.

His death,unlike Mum’s, was sudden. A heart attack. We waited a month before touching the undeveloped roll of film sitting by the bathroom sink. We studied the instructions, assembled all the equipment and, in total darkness, transferred the film to the developing tank. With the lights back on we poured the liquids in, one after the other, waiting until the process was complete.

When the film was ready, we wiped the excess moisture from the long, thin strip and pegged it up to dry. We didn’t recognise the faces straight away. It’s harder than you think on a negative. It was my brother who said, “That’s us.” Thirty-six exposures, taken from a distance; from across the hall, through the half-open ensuite door. Some of us together. Some just my brother or me. Sitting. Standing. Staring into space. Missing Mum. Silently waiting for Dad to emerge from the dark

About the Author

Michelle Wright lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories and flash fiction have won and been shortlisted in numerous awards, including The Age Short Story Award, V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and Bridport Prize. They have been published in Australia and internationally. Her short story collection, Fine, was published in 2016. Her first novel, Small Acts of Defiance, was published in Australia in 2021 and US in 2022. Her second novel, Good Boy, will be out in April 2026.

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Christine H. Chen Highly Commended, June 2025

Awakening

by Christine H Chen

Ah Ma came back from the overnight stay at the hospital in April, leaning on Ba’s shoulder, eyes vacant. Ba shushed us away. Ma went to lay down, didn’t come out from the bedroom for a week. When she emerged in her pajamas, hair tangled like a ball of strings, she went to the fridge, pulled out a box of frozen shrimp Siu Mai, and stared out at the kitchen window until water dripped from the box. We microwaved soggy pieces of dim sum. Ma took a look at the winkled dumplings on her plate, dropped her chopsticks, ran back to her room. For weeks, Ba picked us up from school with bags of Burger King and French fries, sometimes tubs of Moo Shu pork and egg noodle. We chewed as quietly as possible, not daring to break the silence. We stuck our ears to their bedroom door. Ba talking to Ma in a soft voice that rose higher and higher. “What about them? Your other kids, our daughters?” Early morning, a month later, we heard Ma’s old Honda pulling out of the driveway. We spent summer looking for Ma in the supermarkets, running through the aisles, craning our necks to stare at women with a shopping cart, while Ba was busy arguing with the butcher, agonizing over which brand of rice to get. The day our maple tree turned crimson, we heard keys jangling in our front door. Ma stood at the threshold, thinner and older. We squealed. She embraced us. Later that night, she lit up a fire in the backyard, gave us each a piece of a baby garment to throw in the fire. The smoke stung our eyes, the smell caught in our throat. We burned paper money. The fire leapt. Flames jumped. A soul sparked.

About the Author

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in Cleaver, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, Best Small Fictions 2024, 2025 anthologies. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com

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