Writing Challenges set by Jude Higgins

Jude’s offering three ekphrastic prompts, one on each online day, the ‘signature’, ‘technical’ and ‘show stopper’ challenge riffing off The Great British Bake-Off, the long-running UK TV show. You will cook stories instead of cakes. Winner gets publication in our next festival anthology and here on this website plus books. We’re delighted that Diane Simmons will judge these competitions again

Jude Higgins creates and curates the programmes for and directs both the on-line 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 flashfiction collection Clearly Defined Clouds was published in July, 2024.

Judge of our writing contests: Diane Simmons

.
Diane Simmons is Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK. She has been widely published in magazines such as New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction and placed in numerous writing competitions. Finding a Way, her flash collection on the theme of grief, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2019 and shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards in the Best Short Story Collection category. Her historical novella-in-flash An Inheritance was published by V. Press in 2020 and shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards Best Novella category. Her novella-in-flash, set in 1970s Scotland, A Tricky Dance was published by Alien Buddha Press in January 2024 and her novella ‘William Pritchard & Sons’ by Arroyo Seco Press in September 2024 You can read more about Diane on her website www.dianesimmons.co.uk and connect with her on X @scooterwriter

The Star of the Room: Improving Your Prose Poems, with Carrie Etter

In this workshop ( a one hour version of the workshop Carrie offered at our in-person festival weekend, veteran prose poet Carrie Etter will show you how to improve your prose poems through improved musicality, imagery, and pace. Either bring 3-5 prose poems you’ve previously written and want to improve, or come write new prose poems in the session. Not sure if your pieces are prose poems or flash? Bring them anyway.

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, including The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Grief’s Alphabet, her new collection was published by Seren in April 2024. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), a TLS Book of the Year, and Linda Lamus’s posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Individual poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and has received grants from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. After many years teaching at Bath Spa University, in 2022 Etter joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.

Packing an Emotional Punch: with Finnian Burnett

Flash fiction can pack an intense emotional punch in the briefest of spaces. In this workshop, we’ll explore techniques for crafting emotionally compelling characters, creating vivid imagery, and building resonant themes—all of which are designed to give your readers all the feels. In this 60 min generative writing workshop, participants will explore how to dig into personal experiences to craft authentic, impactful stories. Whether you’re aiming to make your readers laugh, cry, or reflect, you’ll discover how to make every word count and leave a lasting impression in just a few hundred words

Finnian Burnett lives in a small town in British Columbia where they write at the intersections of identity—mental health, gender identity, body positivity, and queer joy. They are a 2023 recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant, a 2023 CBC non-fiction finalist, and a 2024 Pushcart Nominee. Finnian’s novella-in-flash, The Clothes Make the Man, shortlisted in the Bath novella-in-flash award and was published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Their second flash collection, The Price of Cookies, was published through Off Topic Publishing. Finnian has recently signed an agent for their epistolary novel about a trans man coming to terms with the death of his mother, and another agent for their collaborative series of queer Shakespeare re-imaginings. They are a frequent presenter, teacher, and keynote speaker at literary and teaching conferences.

60 min workshop with Kathryn Aldridge Morris. Subject to be decided

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris 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 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 is out with Dahlia Books, May 2025.

A Sense of Wonder: with Dave Swann

As a tutor, I’ve witnessed a damaging increase in anxiety amongst young people in recent years, and have started to see wonder as an antidote to the angst that can harm a writer’s confidence. In its origins as a word, ‘anxiety’ was linked to ‘constriction’ and ‘narrowing’ – so it’s little wonder that the condition can close down a writer’s sense of imaginative freedom. In this session (which will include writing exercises and analysis of my own novella Season of Bright Sorrow and the marvellous Jim Heynen flash ‘What Happened During the Ice Storm’), I want to show how the experience of wonder has helped me through tricky moments in my writing life – and to suggest ways in which writers can go beyond themselves, to enrich their flash fiction with unexpected elements. I’m hoping to have some fun, too – if one thing inspires wonder in me, it’s humanity’s continuing ability to find humour and light in the darkest, narrowest places!

David Swann’s Season of Bright Sorrow (Ad Hoc Fiction) won the 2021 Bath Novella-in-Flash Competition, and was named Rubery Book of the Year in 2023. Another novella, The Twisted Wheel, finished runner-up in the 2022 Bath competition. His stories and poems have won many awards (including eleven at The Bridport Prize and two in the National Poetry Competition). His collection The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), about his residency in a prison, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize. After many years as a university lecturer, Dave now works at Cumbria University as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and is busy with a commission from the National Literacy Trust to write a community poem for his beloved Blackburn Rovers!

Transforming Tales: Hybrid forms and structures in flash fiction: with Farhana Khalique

What do cronuts, cockapoos, and cover versions have in common? Hint: they all involve some kind of transformation or hybridity! In this 60 minute workshop, we’ll explore using transformation and hybridity in flash fiction. We’ll look at how to find inspiration in unusual places and different media, read and discuss examples of published flash, and write new pieces of our own. All welcome!

Farhana Khalique is a writer, editor, voice over artist, teacher, and PhD candidate from south-west London, UK. Her writing appears in Flash Fusion, Tales from the City, Best Small Fictions, and more. She’s judged the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, is a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, and she’s a writing tutor at City Lit. Find Farhana online @HanaKhalique and www.farhanakhalique.com

Lost and Found: Using Objects to Bring the Past to Life with Emily Devane

Objects are a rich source of inspiration for storytelling. We’ll be delving into our creative attics – real and imagined – to explore how objects from the past inspire stories in the present. We’ll consider the ‘lost’ objects that remain in our memories, and the ‘found’ items whose stories we can only imagine. This will be a generative session filled with prompts and examples to help unlock powerful memories and spark new narratives.

Emily Devane is a writer, editor, bookseller and teacher based in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. She has taught workshops and courses for Comma Press, Dahlia Press, London Writers’ Café and Tracks Darlington. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, a Northern Writers’ Award and a Word Factory Apprenticeship. Emily’s work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly (third place, Grand Micro Contest 2021), Best Microfictions Anthology (2021), New Flash Fiction Review, Lost Balloon, Ellipsis, New Flash Fiction Review, Janus Literary, Ambit and others. She is a founding editor at FlashBack Fiction. Last year she was shortlisted for the prestigious Mogford Prize for Food and Drink Writing, and she also won second place in the Bath Short Story Award. Emily runs regular spoken word nights and teaches at Moor Words.

A Short-Short Introduction: A Form of Japanese Flash Fiction with a Twist: with Heidi Clark

Short-shorts (shōtoshōto) are a popular form of light, very short fiction in Japan. With fun and absurd translated examples, this session is an introduction to the history and patterns of short-shorts, with a focus on how the conventions of Japanese humour shape the story’s end. Please bring along one of your short pieces to try some experiments with the ending.

Heidi Clark is a literary translator from Japanese to English. With a focus on experiments in form, she has worked on projects involving the rendering of invented languages, poetry translations defined by Oulipian constraints, and the visual presentation of early modern Japanese graphic narratives (kusazōshi). She is currently completing a Masters in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and is based in Norwich.

Elements of Flash: with Christopher Allen

Flash writers approach the page–both drafting and editing–differently from writers of longer narrative forms. If you’re new to flash or if you want to revise your craft this workshop covers the foundational aspects of the flash narrative.

It’s an excellent place to start.

Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023), The Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Split Lip, Booth, PANK, and Indiana Review, among other very nice places. Allen has been the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly since January 2020 and was the 2023 judge of the Bridport Prize for flash fiction. He and his husband are nomads.

aption id=”attachment_1215″ align=”alignright” width=”248″] Ingrid Jendrzejewski[/caption]

Hunting and Gathering: with Ingrid Jendrzejewski

Ingrid Jendrzejewski is a co-director of National Flash Fiction Day. She currently serves as the Editor in Chief of FlashBack Fiction, and a flash editor at JMWW, and has served as both non-fiction editor and editor-in-chief of the Evansville Review. She has published over 100 shortform pieces and has won multiple flash fiction competitions, including the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction. Her short collection Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping was a runner up for BFFA’s first Novella-in-Flash competition. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Vestal Review’s VERA Award, and multiple times for Best Small Fictions.