Ekphrastic Writing Prompts for the online festival competitions.

Jude will offer an ekphrastic writing prompt for each of the online festival day mini competitions. Writers are asked to submit their stories a week after each festival day for judging by National Flash Fiction Day co-director Diane Simmons. Prizes for the winners and runners-up of each day are publication on this website and in the next Flash Fiction Festival Anthology.

Jude Higgins creates the programmes for, and directs both the online and in person Flash Fiction Festivals UK. She founded Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2015, has co-run The Bath Short Story Award since 2013 and directs the short-short fiction press, Ad Hoc fiction. Her flash fiction has won or been placed in many awards and she is widely published in magazines and anthologies. Her flash fiction chapbook ‘The Chemist’s House’ was published in 2017 by V. Press and her flash fiction collection Clearly Defined Clouds was published in July, 2024. She has been organising these online flash fiction festivals since the pandemic in 2020 and has directed the in-person weekend festival since 2017.

Online festival competition judge Diane Simmons

Diane Simmons is Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK. Widely published in magazines such as New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction and placed in numerous writing competitions, she is the author of five novellas-in-flash: Finding a Way (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019 ), An Inheritance (V. Press, 2020), A Tricky Dance (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), William Prichard & Co (Arroyo Seco Press, 2024) and Bereft of Reason ( V. Press, 2026). She has twice been shortlisted in The Saboteur Awards. She is a regular judge for Flash 500 and the online Flash Fiction Festival competitions and has co-edited eight Flash Fiction Festival anthologies. You can read more about Diane on her website: www.dianesimmons.co.uk and connect with her on Bluesky @scootewriter.bsky.social

The Female Gothic with Susmita Bhattacharya

In the Female Gothic, women can explore and adventure within the home in the same way male heroes were represented exploring and adventuring far from the home. In this same vein, the central figures of the Female Gothic are women who are at once heroines and victims.They are threatened, usually by a patriarchal figure or thing, but still manage to be brave to confront and survive the threat. Whereas unreal or supernatural things are expected to be accepted as real in Gothic novels, in the Female Gothic the questions are answered at the end and the reader is left with a logical explanation.- Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” The New York Review, 21 Mar. 1974.

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian writer living in Winchester, UK. The Normal State of Mind (Parthian) was longlisted at the Mumbai Film Festival, 2018. Her short story collection, Table Manners (Dahlia Publishing) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection and was serialised on BBC Radio 4 Extra. She is co-founder of the ACE-funded ‘Write Beyond Borders Mentoring Programme’ and ‘Bridges not Borders’ project. She is a multidisciplinary artist who does several projects in schools and the community in the Solent region and has co-edited Flash Fusion: An Anthology of Flash Fiction & Conversations on Craft by South Asian Writers.
BlueSky: Susmitab.bsky.social Instagram: Susmita_b_writer

Writing the Unexpected in Flash (how to upend cliches and make it strange)

In flash fiction, every word builds expectation which makes it the perfect form to surprise the reader by not giving them what they expect. In this joyful, hands-on workshop, we’ll explore how to upend clichés and make the familiar strange by twisting what readers assume will come next. Through examples, playful brainstorming, and creative prompts, you’ll learn how to craft the unexpected using character, point of view, and narrative turns.

Finnian Burnett is a writer, educator, and champion of creative chaos. Their work explores the glorious mess of human identity, gender, bodies, and mental health. Finnian’s work appears in Writer’s Digest, Geist, CBC Books, and Pulp Literature. Their first novella-in-flash, The Clothes Make the Man shortlisted for the Bath NIF prize and subsequent novellas-in-flash, The Price of Cookies and Redshirts Sometimes Survive, are available from Off Topic Publishing. When not writing or teaching, Finnian can be found collecting rocks, watching Star Trek, or enjoying cat memes with ridiculous devotion.

From Zero to Nifty in Sixty Minutes: with Fiona McKay

So, you have an idea for a Novella-in-Flash, and you’re not sure how to find the way in? This workshop will take a look at some different approaches to help you take that idea, that short story, that cluster of flashes you have and write it into a cohesive NiF. We will look at structure – is what you’re thinking about or writing a NiF? Or is it a novella? Or a collection? What makes a NiF different to these? How do you construct a timeline for your NiF? What does your narrative arc look like?
Participants will finish with a clear plan for how to move forward with their work.

Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead, Ad Hoc Fiction (2025), The Top Road, Ad Hoc Fiction (2023), and the flash fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). Her most recent NIF, Her Permanent Collection is highly commended in the Bath flash Novella in Flash Award, 2026. She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her flash fiction is in Pithead Chapel, The Forge, trampset, Fractured Lit and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland, and is addicted to writing Novellas-in-Flash.

The Ripple Effect: How to Use Negative Space to Expand Your Flash: with David Schuman

This workshop borrows from visual art to investigate the concept of “negative space.” What exists between the lines and beyond the boundaries of the page? How can a writer hint at the past and future and gesture into the larger space and world of a narrative? We’ll explore these ideas using examples from classic and contemporary flash fiction and some generative in-workshop writing prompts.

David Schuman is the director of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in Catapult, Fence, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, and many other publications. His work has been anthologized, most recently in Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilized Times, published by the Dark Mountain Project. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship and has twice had stories listed as “distinguished” in the Best American series. His prose chapbook, Best Men, was published by Tammy Press.

This Mad and Furious World: Writing flash fiction in the shadow of global events: with Alison Powell

Flash fiction often distils the relationship between individual lives and the wider historical moment. In this generative workshop, we will examine flash fiction pieces in which major political and social events – the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of George Floyd, the 2025 Los Angeles riots, among others – operate not merely as context but as active narrative pressures. Through close discussion and guided prompts, you will reflect on events that have shaped your own sense of time and place, and consider how large-scale histories reverberate through the smallest human moments. You will produce several new drafts and develop strategies for drawing on the mad and furious world around us as a generative resource that you can delve into long after the workshop has ended.

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, runner-up places in Flash 500 and the Bridport Prize and won the June 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award. 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 and supports a global community of writers through her venture WriteClub. Find her on Insta/FB: @hellowriteclub or via www.writeclub.org.uk

Isolation is your flash friend: with Gillian O’Shaughnessy

Writing from the world’s most isolated major city, GillianO’Shaughnessy places her characters in her beloved port city ofFremantle and the rugged outback of Western Australia to explore setting and identity in flash fiction writing. Whether you write from the city, towns or country, this generative workshop will show you how setting can be used to deepen the emotional engagement of flash fiction and propel the story forward.

Gillian O’Shaughnessy is one of Australia’s most celebrated flash fiction writers and a highly respected journalist and presenter. Her work has been widely published, winning international prizes and featuring in the Best Small Fictions, (2023–2025). Gillian spent 25 years as a presenter and reporter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and has interviewed some of the world’s most prominent authors and public figures, including the late Dame Hilary Mantel, Marian Keyes, Helen Garner, Anna Funder and Sir Ian McKellan, among others. Gillian is a sub-editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, teaches masterclasses in flash fiction, and is serving as a 2026 Australian Stella Prize judge. Salt City Runaway is Gillian’s first book. She lives in Fremantle, Western Australia.

From Fact to Fiction: How Research Can Enhance Your Stories: with Beth Sherman

Want to discover surprising things to write about? Make your piece more believable? Add details, depth, and narrative layers? In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to use the news, the natural world, outer space, tiny factoids, and events happening near you or halfway across the world, to take your stories to the next level. Using prompts, generative writing exercises, and visual cues, we’ll explore how research can be a useful tool for the flash writer.

Beth Sherman has had more than 200 stories published in literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and Smokelong Quarterly, where she’s a Submissions Editor and the winner of Smokelong’s 2024 Workshop Prize. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025. She’s also a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Sherman has a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and an MFA from Queens College. She was runner-up in the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash with her NIF How to Get There From Here Also the author of five mystery novels, she can be reached on social media @bsherm36.

Reading as Writers:with Alison Woodhouse

Beyond the pleasure it gives us, what can we, as writers, learn about craft from close reading? In this workshop we will read a flash story and discuss the techniques used by the author to deepen our appreciation and understanding. We will identify ‘tools’ and share interpretations of meaning and impact. We will focus on resonance and movement within the story and finally we’ll discuss ways we can use close reading in the all-important editing stage of our own work.

Alison Woodhouse is a writer, teacher and mentor based in the Southwest, currently in her 3rd year of a funded PhD in Creative Writing, exploring polyphony. In 2026, she was awarded a UKRI fellowship to conduct 3-month archival research into the writing process of contemporary authors, including Kazio Ishiguro and Rachel Cusk, at Texas University, Austin. Her short fiction has won a number of competitions, most recently Mslexia, and many other pieces have been placed or shortlisted and are widely published both in print and online. Her debut Novella in Flash, The House on the Corner, was published in 2020 by Ad Hoc Fiction and is available from Amazon in kindle and paperback formats, her flash fiction collection, Family Frames, was published in 2021 by V Press.

Yoga for Writers with Sudha Balagopal

We’re delighted that once again Sudha is offering her invaluable 15 min sessions offering yoga stretches for writers on all three days A refreshing interlude in a long festival online day. She offered these sessions for us all through the pandemic and ever since.

Sudha Balagopal’s fiction straddles continents and cultures, blending thoughts and ideas from the east and the west. She is honored to have her writing in many fine journals including The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, CRAFT, The Maine Review and Bureau Dispatch. Her highly-commended novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc fiction in 2021. She has stories included in Best Small Fictions, 2022 and 2023. Her novella in flash Nose Ornaments was a runner up in the 2024 Bath Novella in Flash Award and was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in summer, 2024. She is the editor for the Wigleaf Top Fifty. When she’s not writing, she teaches yoga. Find her on Twitter @authorsudha or at www.sudhabalagopal.com