Thank you so much to writer, and learning facilitator, Sage Tyrtle who was our writing contest judge for the tenth of our Flash Fiction Festival Days.She set a great prompt based on Van Gogh’s Cafe terrace painting. Thank you also to all the writers who entered. (Please check out Sage’s website, linked above, for more of her workshops inspiring writers with wonderful prompts).

The winner, selected by Sage, is Sara Hills
Sage wrote these comments on ‘Tomorrow at Cafe La Nuit’, Sara’s story.

“The use of vivid, rich colour to create character and setting worked extremely well. There were lyrical phrases like “daisied-star sky” that I wanted to eat up like small chocolates, and the last two paragraphsgave me goosebumps.”

Sara Hills’ bio.
Sara Hills is the author of the flash fiction collection The Evolution of Birds (Ad Hoc Fiction). Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, X-R-A-Y Literary, Cease Cows, Fractured Lit, Reckon Review, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, UK and tweets from @sarahillswrites.

This is the fourth time Sara has won one of the writing challenges. This time she wins the artist mug featuring the painting on which her story is based £30 plus publication.She also won a winner of winner’s prize for a story from our first festival day series last year.

Many congratulations to her! Her marvellous winning story will be published in Flash Fiction Festival Anthology, Vol 5, which will be out at the end of this year. As this is rather a long way ahead, we have also published both Sara’s story and the runner-up story by David Lewis here on this site.

Sara also has previous prize winning stories in Vol 4 of our Festival Anthologies which will be published by our sponsor, Ad Hoc Fiction, before the end of this month joining the three pictured.

The runner up selected by Sage is David Lewis,a writer from France. David read a wonderful ‘Hermit Crab’ pieces at the Feburary festival day. Congratulations to him for this equally inventive new piece. It is published now on this site and we will be able to read it in Flash Fiction Festival Anthology, Vol 5, along with Sara’s story. David also wins an anthology from any of the collection at Ad Hoc Fiction.

Sage made these comments on his story:

‘Minor Planet 4457’
“The way the author approached time was very compelling. Not “tomorrow”,
but “eleven minutes from now”, stretching all the way to ninety-nine
years. Such a clever way to approach this true, tragic story.”

David Lewis bio

David Lewis is a former foreign correspondent, writer on AIDS, and communicator for the Eurovision Song Contest. He has lived in France, close to Geneva, for 30 years. Since losing his job he has tried to recycle himself into a Proper Writer, becoming a keen flasher since joining the Retreat West writing community. Last year he won the Bangor Literary Journal’s 40-word competition.