Book here for the three hour workshop with Kathy Fish from 2.00 – 5.00 pm Friday 8th July at Trinity College. Cost £50. Buy via the paypal button below. Twenty-five places available. Read in Full
You are welcome to arrive from 2.00 pm onwards on Friday 8th July for the in-person flash fiction festival at Trinity College, Bristol. There are also some extra places now available on the pre festival three hour workshop with Kathy Fish which is taking place from 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm. This is also open for those not attending the rest of the festival weekend. (If you need help with booking accommodation or have dietary requests, please contact us. And check out the list of accommodations.
Friday Meals
You can bring a picnic or order a Teatime Box from our excellent Bristol-based caterer, Campbell’s Kitchen if you are coming early or want to pick one up later.
£8.50. Order via Paypal .
Tea Time Boxes: Tarts with pesto, olives, and cherry tomatoes Potato Salad, Coleslaw, Garden Salad.Chocolate Brownie.
(Suitable for vegans. Please contact Hospitality Director, Diane Simmons diane (at)flashfictionfestival (dot com, if you woud like a gluten-free option)
Campbells Kitchen delivering
Outside Trinity College
For the New Year, there were two contests for the Great Flash Fiction Festival Throwdown challenges on January 8th. Thank you to Electra Rhodes and Karen Jones for setting the challenges and judging the entries. Electra’s writing challenge was based on the painting ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent Van Gogh and Karen’s was based on Claude Monet’s ‘The Poppy Field’. Mugs, shown in the stack here, featuring these paintings, form part of the winners prize and both our judges created great prompts. Our winners also receive £30 cash and publication and two runners-up a book from Ad Hoc Fiction plus publication in the Flash Fiction Festival Anthology due out soon.
Electra and Karen have now chosen their winners
Electra said:
photo by Serge Van Neck on Unsplash
In the end I plumped for one where I liked the way the piece accreted new layers throughout, and built and built and built. The language was clean and the characters effectively drawn in few words, and it was laced with a melancholy and regret which was subtly done but which stayed with me afterwards. So ‘The Lost Man in Van Gogh’s Starry Night’ is the winner”
(This story was written by Marzia Rahman from Bangladesh.
Marzia Rahman is a Bangladeshi fiction writer and translator of short stories and poetry. Her short fictions have appeared in many magazines and journals worldwide. Her novella in flash, Life on the Edges, was longlisted in the Bath Novella in Flash Award in 2018. She is also a painter.
“The runner-up is the one that made me laugh, I’m a bit of a sobersides and I went into the reading of all the entries ready to experience a range of emotions but without an expectation I’d find something I thought really funny. I admit it’s quite a dark humour and I’m not entirely sure whether or not it’s an unreliable narrator telling a tall tale, or what exactly did or didn’t happen, but, again, the story stayed with me afterwards. I admit too, to being a bit of a sucker for punny titles so, ‘Poetic Justice’ is my runner-up.”
(This story was written by Marie Gethins from Ireland)
Marie Gethins’ flash fiction is widely published in magazines and journals and she has won or been placed in many short fiction awards. Marie is a Pushcart and Best of the Short Fictions nominee and an editor for Splonk literary magazine in Ireland.
Karen said:
photo by Corina-ardeleanu-sWlxCweDzzs-unsplash-1
First place: ‘Restoration’ a great take on the prompt and I loved the way the sections slotted together, just like the bowl in the story. The use of colours was beautifully done.
(This story was written by Corrine Leith from the UK)
Corrine Leith lives in rural England with a cat, a dog and two ponies. She writes a mix of flash fiction, poetry and children’s stories which have been published in print and online. She is a previous winner of The Potteries Prize for Flash Fiction and was runner-up in the latest annual Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition.
Runner up: ‘I See Red’. Using different shades of this colour was a perfect way to tell this story. The anger and hurt builds through the sections and I felt I could really see and feel everything the mc went through.
(This story was written by Sudha Balagopal from the US)
Sudha Balagopal’s short fiction has been published in journals around the world, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fiction and will be included in Best Micro Fictions in 2022. Her novella in flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma was highly commended in the 2021 Bath Flash Fiction Award and published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching yoga.
Many congratulations to all four writers! We’re looking forward to seeing them all in print in Flash Fiction Festival Anthology Vol Four.
Photo by Billy Huynh, Unsplash
Sara based her prompt on the well-known picture ‘The Kiss’ by Gustav Klimt’ and following Sara’s excellent instructions, entrants were asked to write a story involving a kiss of some sort. Read in Full
Participants at the first of the new series of flash fiction festival days in October had the opportunity to take part in a mini flash fiction contest. Our contests for this round of the five day series are inspired by the British TV show – The Great Pottery Throwdown. It is renowned for one of the judges, who is moved to tears by the wonderful creations the amateur potters make. Read more on our post about the contest.
We are giving away mugs and a £30 cash prize plus publication for a winning story each month plus a book giveaway from Ad Hoc Fiction for the runner up. We ask people to write stories that make an emotional impact.
Our first judge from the October festival day was Diane Simmons who based her prompt on a mug featuring Van Gogh’s sunflowers. She selected ‘Inside My Father’s Head’ by UK writer Ali McGrane. Ali McGrane won one of the Signature contests in our last series with her story ‘This is Not A Story About A Rainstick’ and was selected The Winner of Winners of the Signature Challenge for the same story by our judge team at the end of the series. Many congratulations to Ali who co-incidentally will also have her novella in flash The Listening Project up on preorder with Ad Hoc Fiction later this week. The Listening Project was shortlisted by Michelle Elvy in the Bath Novella in Flash Award in 2020.
Bio
Ali McGrane lives and writes between the sea and the moor. Her work has appeared in anthologies and online, including Ellipsis Zine, FlashBack Fiction, Janus Literary, Splonk, and on shortlists including the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her Bath shortlisted flash novella, The Listening Project, is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction Find her on Twitter: @Ali_McGrane_UK. Read in Full
Photo by Billy Huynh, Unsplash
For those of you in the know, in our last series of Festival Days, March to August this year, we cloned the TV show,The Great British Bake Off and, instead of baking tasks, different judge duos gave festival participants the tasks of writing flash fictions to signature, technical and showstopper challenges.
Monthly judges duos were:Diane Simmons and Robert Barrett; Karen Jones and Tim Craig; Damhnait Monaghan and Alison Woodhouse; Ken Elkes and Helen Rye;, Jeanette Sheppard and Matt Kendrick and Ingrid Jendrzejewski and Neil Clark. These judges chose winners for each challenge. And eight of them kindly agreed to vote for their winner and winners for each category.Each winner receives £50 in cash. Stories were neck and neck in the points scored, but we did end up with three clear winners.
So, many congratulations to Ali McGrane who was voted winner of winners in the Signature Challenge for her story ‘This is Not a Story About a Rainstick’; Rosaleen Lynch was voted winner of winners in the Technical Challenge for her story with ‘Recipe for Sustenance to avoid the end of the world as we know it, served with fresh roles’ and Sara Hills who won winner of winners in the Showstopper Challenge for her story ‘Blue’. Read in Full
photo by vy huynh on Unsplash
We had forty entries in all, which we thought was a good result for the challenge of writing a hermit crab micro so short on a the very exacting subject! Half the money raised from the entry cost of £5.00 goes to the winner and half to the Huntington’s Disease Association Charity. The festival has covered paypal charges to round up the funds received to £200.
and we are delighted to give the winner £100 and £100 to the charity.
The runner up receives books from Ad Hoc Fiction, a flash fiction festival tote bag and a free entry to Bath Flash Fiction Award. And the other three writers writer and co-director of Flash Fiction Festivals UK, Diane Simmons, selected for her top five have been offered publication in the festival anthology and will receive a free copy.
Our thanks to Diane for judging this competition. She read all the micros blind and said she greatly enjoyed the variety of recipe stories served up and was impressed with how people managed to use this structure. Her comments on her top five stories are below and bios of the writers are coming soon. Read in Full
photo by Serge Van Neck on Unsplash
first 3 anthologies
photo by stories-ys8qztLjJyg-unsplash
For each category, the winner will receive a book from the anthologies published by Ad Hoc Fiction, a free entry to the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Festival tote bag and two free sessions on the Tuesday flash fiction group led by Jude Higgins. In addition, the stories will be published in our Festival Anthology to be published by Ad Hoc Fiction and entered into our winners of winners contest for a chance of winning £50 for each of the challenges. We’re very much looking forward to seeing all these stories in print.
The Winner of the Signature challenge is Adele Rickerby for her story Missing Person. Adele Rickerby only recently discovered flash fiction, but has quickly become enamoured with the form. She currently lives in beautiful Heidelberg, Germany, a ridiculously long way from her Australian roots and family. She is about to start an MSt in Creative Writing at Cambridge University and is alternately thrilled and terrified.
Adele also won the May technical challenge judged by Helen Rye with her story ‘Dust to Dust’
Jeanette, who judged this challenge, made this comment about ‘Missing Person’.
The opening sentence and the idea of a disappearing-child-made-literal are intriguing. White space is used to great effect here, adding layers to the story as it unfolds.
The Winner of the Technical Challenge is Gina Headden for her story Air is Lighter Than Water. Gina’s fiction has been published on audio platforms, in anthologies and in fiction and non-fiction magazines including The Cabinet of Heed, Flashback Fiction, Ellipsis Zine, The Longleaf Review, NFFD’s Flash Flood and the Sunday Herald Magazine. Forthcoming in Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2021.
Gina also received an honourable mention in the April Flash Off challenges for her story, ‘Blown Glass Birds’ and this story will also be published in the Festival Anthology.
Matt, who judged this challenge, made these comments about ‘Air is Lighter Than Water’
A wonderful microcosm of a story that explores a sister and brother’s changing relationship in the wake of their father’s death. I enjoyed how the story starts and ends with the same image of the narrator blowing dandelion clocks and how the writer has woven in splashes of humour and other tonal shifts.
photo by christine-jou-6PPQDX2liKE-unsplash
Sara is now a three times winner of the Festival Flash-Off challenges, having won the Showstopper challenge judged by Damhnait Monaghan and Alison Woodhouse in June for her story ‘Lessons in Attachment Parenting’ and the technical challenge in the April Flash-Off judged by Karen Jones for her story ‘Teenage Kicks’.
Jeanette and Matt who jointly judged this challenge made these comments about ‘Blue’.
This was a clear winner for both of us. It moved us, ultimately, and the revelations are lightly done. We thought it a strong example of a story revealed through a list and it fitted the ‘illusion’ challenge in both content and form.
The final Great Festival Flash Off Day of this series is on August 28th. Judges this time are writers and editors Ingrid Jenrzejewski and Neil Clark. Places still available for the whole day which costs £30 for all events. There are also some free places for those short of funds. Contact us if you would like one.
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