Are you looking for a flash of inspiration this autumn? Do you want to get into a better writing habit but not get hung up on word counts?

It’s the season for cosy nights, glowing fires, warm soups, fairy lights, fireworks and NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) happens every year in November, and we want to expand it into flash fiction by throwing away the word count.

If you’re up for the challenge, then ignite your writing habit and write a flash fiction story every day (no word counts required), with Author and Director of the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Freya Morris, and Marie Gethins, award-winning writer and editor of the Irish flash ezine Splonk. For less than the average coffee cost per session, we’ll get you writing again and enjoying it.

To keep your fuse lit and your inspiration on fire, we will be focusing on creating first drafts only and staying in ‘creation mode’ – just like NaNoWriMo. You won’t be asked to share your writing or offer feedback. So we invite you to show up in any way you need that helps you write, whether that’s PJs, black screens, food and drink, or duvets. Creativity comes when we feel the most relaxed to create, so show up on your own terms.

Who for: Beginners / Writers looking to start writing frequently after a dry spell.

Cost: £99 / £70 (16 available) / Free places (SOLD)

Workshop times: 1 – 30 November, 7.30pm – 8.30pm (GMT) every day

What to expect over 30 days

• A FlashWriMo Welcome Pack in the post. Includes a notebook, calendar/habit tracker with stickers, advice for pre-FlashWriMo prep, Commitment Form, Keep Out sign, box of matches, an Ignite badge, tea bag, and copy of This is (not about) David Bowie by FJ Morris. (Terms: Must be booked onto the course at least a week in advance to get in time.)
• A one hour Zoom session every day from 7.30-8.30 with Freya Morris and Marie, providing prompts, guides, inspiration and more. 
• Daily emails and flash stories to ignite your creativity. 
• Prizes for 7 day streaks and if you complete the whole 30 days.

It’s time to light up November and get writing!

The course was wonderful. When I first signed up I didn’t know what to expect, and was afraid it would be intimidating and I’d be out of my depth, but Freya did a wonderful job and I felt very at ease. I feel very inspired to write. Thank you! Flashy Gifts Workshop Participant

Your Hosts

Marie Gethins

Marie is an award-winning writer and editor of the Irish flash ezine Splonk. Her stories have been selected for  2020 BIFFY50 , 2021 Best Microfictions, and 2023 Best Small Fictions. She has also been nominated for a British Screenwriters Award, Best of the Net, and three Pushcart Awards. Marie has a BA in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture, a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick. Her flash fiction has fea­tured in NFFD Anthologies, Bristol Short Story Anthology, Reflex, Jellyfish Review, Mslexia, Litro, NANO, Fictive Dream, Spelk, Ellipsis Zine, and many others.

Freya Morris

Freya is an award-winning writer and Director of the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Freya’s collection ‘This is (not about) David Bowie’ was published by Retreat West and received a special mention in the Saboteur Awards for Best Short Story Collection in 2019. In 2021, they were awarded DYCP Arts Council funding for their novel in progress, Burning down the house.

Freya has been published in numerous publications in the UK and internationally, and shortlisted for a variety of awards. You can find Freya’s stories soaring the skies thanks to a short story vending machine, and gracing pillows in a hotel in Indonesia.

We are thrilled to announce our short list for the summer Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023, which features nine writers who will also be eligible for the ‘New Voice’ Prize.

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

SHORT LISTED STORIES

Those on the short list will be awarded publication in our next anthology and a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

We will be announcing the winners in a few week’s time, so watch this space! 

Our next competition will be opening on the 1 November 2023. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

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Ignite: 30 days of flash fiction course

Are you looking for a flash of inspiration this autumn? Do you want to get into a better writing habit but not get hung up on word counts?

It’s the season for cosy nights, glowing fires, warm soups, fairy lights, fireworks and NaNoWriMo. National Novel Month (NaNoWriMo) happens every year in November, and we are here to expand it into flash fiction and throw away the word count.

If you’re up for the challenge, then ignite your writing habit and write a flash fiction story every day (no word counts required), with Author and Director of the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Freya Morris, and Marie Gethins, award-winning writer and editor of the Irish flash ezine, Splonk. For less than the average coffee cost per session, we’ll get you writing again and enjoying it.

We are thrilled to announce our long list for the summer Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023.

Congratulations to all of the authors who reached the list and for all those who entered this round. We saw a wonderful range of genres, topics and stories from all over the world, and it was hugely competitive. Many wonderful stories just missed the final list and for those we have permission to email – we will be letting you know! 

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

LONG LISTED STORIES

In the next few weeks, we will be announcing our shortlist, who will be awarded publication in our next anthology and a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

So watch this space! 

Our next competition will be opening on the 1 November 2023. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

---

Ignite: 30 days of flash fiction course

Are you looking for a flash of inspiration this autumn? Do you want to get into a better writing habit but not get hung up on word counts?

It’s the season for cosy nights, glowing fires, warm soups, fairy lights, fireworks and NaNoWriMo. National Novel Month (NaNoWriMo) happens every year in November, and we are here to expand it into flash fiction and throw away the word count.

If you’re up for the challenge, then ignite your writing habit and write a flash fiction story every day (no word counts required), with Author and Director of the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Freya Morris, and Marie Gethins, award-winning writer and editor of the Irish flash ezine, Splonk. For less than the average coffee cost per session, we’ll get you writing again and enjoying it.

Raw talent is a precious gem waiting to be discovered. It is the spark that ignites the imagination. The unpolished brilliance that holds the potential to captivate readers. 

At the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, we believe in fostering and encouraging these emerging voices. So we are thrilled to announce an increase in prize money for our summer competition New Voice Prize to £400. Two runners ups will also have an editor work with them on polishing their story for publication.

New Voice Prize – £400
Runners up – Editorial guidance with Marie Gethins

Our New Voice Prize is for writers who have never had a story published before online or in print. We know that the journey from a raw manuscript to a polished masterpiece can be daunting. Therefore, each selected winner and runner-up will have the chance to collaborate with an experienced editor. Award-winning flash fiction writer and editor of the Irish flash ezine Splonk, Marie Gethins will provide invaluable guidance, feedback, and support throughout the editing process to ensure each story reaches its full potential before being published in the anthology.

Financial constraints often hinder budding writers from fully exploring their potential. This is why we want to provide this one-off opportunity to invest in their craft, pursue their dreams, and further develop their skills. We want to remove the barriers that talented individuals face to create an environment that encourages their creativity.

We are committed to empowering and celebrating new and emerging talent from all backgrounds. By investing in emerging voices, we hope to unlock new dimensions of storytelling that will inspire others to write too. 

So if you are an inspiring writer, be sure to tick the box ‘I have never had a story published before’ when entering to be considered for the New Voice Award. 

Lemonade

I hear ‘im before ‘e arrives on the street, bottles rattling together like bones. Mam’s in the kitchen holding onto a cuppa tea like it’s a life raft, eyes sore and swollen as lemons with all the cryin’. She kicked Sammy out last night – caught ‘im spyin’ on Kel as she got ready fer swimming. He’s allus bin a bit of a creep ‘as Sammy – mi other sister said she’d caught ‘im lookin’ at ‘er when Mam wasn’t there. She threatened to kick ‘im in the balls – no-one messes with our Kat.

Anyhow I can hear Popman rattling through the estate, and I’ve got mi clean bottles ready to swap for pennies and I’m looking forrad to a cool glass of lemonade with the chippy tea Mam’s promised. And I’m gonna gi‘er a few of mi pennies, just to show I appreciates ‘er, just to show I loves ‘er.

Dandelion and Burdock

Mam’s at kitchen table when I gets in from school, hands around a mug of summat that I’m pretty sure isn’t tea. These days she allus looks knackered. Since Sammy went she doesn’t sleep and ‘er eyes look like maw of a grave – like mi Dad’s afore they lowered ‘im into it. I gies ‘er a cuddle that slides off ‘er like rain, and I just wants to know, just to know ‘ow to mek ‘er better. ‘Ow to mek ‘er the Mam she was afore our Mickey were born cold, afore Dad took ’is own life and left ‘er to deal with me and Kel and Kat by ‘erself. Afore Sammy come and med things better, and then worse.

Popman’s bin and I get meself a glass of D&B and I remember our Kat once rubbing burdock onto a patch of nettle stings on mi ankle, remember it soothing and cooling, calming the angry red rash, and I pour mi Mam a glass and leave it by her hand and cross mi fingers that she might drink it, that it might help.

American Cream Soda

Today were a good day. Today we ‘ad mi ole Mam back. I gets in from school and she’s mekin dinner – fishie fingers as crispy as yer like, and them chips yer put in oven – a bit soggy but we don’t bother – and mushy peas that mek kitchen smell of farts and we mek Mam laugh rasping with our lips on ‘er neck and ‘er arms as she’s tryna get stuff done.

Popman’s bin and she’s got these big ole pint glasses which she fills with American Cream Soda, then she scoops a perfect egg shape out of a big tub of vanilla and drops it in the glass. Pop sizzles and bubbles like sea at bottom of cliffs, and the icecream pops back up and floats like an island, like Kelham Island mebbes. She slips in stripey straws, and we suck and suck and suck, and it’s like drinking candy floss, like drinking the happiest memory you ever had.

Cherryade

It were our Kat that found ‘er. Sitting at kitchen table like allus, smell of marzipan fillin’ room, smell of marzipan and vodka and an empty bottle of pills reght next to ‘er hand. She’d bin taken away by time me and Kel got in and there’s all these uniform types millin’ around the place. Our Kat’s 18, old enough to tek us on, but she looks scared and sad and small. She looks just like mi Mam.

Popman’s bin and there’s a fresh bottle of Cherryade on side waiting for us, like Mam thought we might want a bit of pop with our death in the afternoon. There’s a small pile of coins beside it – pennies and tuppence mostly, the odd five pee – and I slip ‘em into mi pocket as if they might help, as if they might mek things better.

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The author’s distinctive voice imbues the work with a sense of originality. The use of drinks as symbolism and the exploration of memory as a theme are particularly noteworthy and brilliantly crafted.

Mustapha Enesi

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The sickly sweet taste and corrosive of soda pop is the backdrop and innovative structure to a tragic family story beautiful told in poetic language; lines such as “a perfect egg shape out of a big tub of vanilla” blew us away making this story a clear and deserving winner. 

Camilla Grudova

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Maria Thomas is a middle-aged, apple-shaped mum of two. She has work in various publications and was shortlisted in the 2022 Oxford Flash Fiction competition and a finalist in the London Independent Story Prize (LISP) 2022. Maria won Retreat West’s April 2022 Micro competition, was a runner up in their AMOK themed quarterly flash comp, and took second place in Propelling Pencil 2022.

She can be found on Twitter as @AppleWriter.
 

country kid in country clothes comes to the city to revel and rebel in ways his Christian parents would disown him for, but they won’t ever know because that was the whole point in coming here, to graze among the flowing queens and exaggerated queers and all the other seductive strangers, more kin to him than his own, but he has no money so he sells his ass on weeping streets and comes to know the girls who call them home, and they teach him how to survive, where to get clothes and soup, and what johns to stay away from, and where to score the best dope, because you need something to round off the sharp edges in this city of straight lines and caustic wit, burning bridges and flaming towers like thorns that fling the sunlight back and forth, one to another in a circle of blazing light, and it’s too bright and too hard and everything’s for sale here, hearts and souls, and the streets are choked with empty people, racing, pacing, breathless, feckless, and he hurts so bad inside, he cries his way to sleep at night and wishes he’d never left but he couldn’t be himself or hide the sinful truth, and everything they ever taught him about being good and decent and proper gnaws at his mind even as the rats gnaw at his toes and he kicks them away and they squeal as they run, then one night he gets picked up by this nice old john who says his name is Stephen and maybe he can help, but the help he offers is a regular job and a trip to rehab, and the kid turns him down because he can’t leave behind the life he’s come to know as normal, and it’s amazing what a person can get used to but they say that’s how it goes, the abnormal becomes normal, and one morning he wakes up early and goes to the park and a blackbird warbles just for him, and the grass is frost-silvered and skin-soft, so he takes off his sneakers and walks barefoot to touch the earth and ground himself, and the cold makes him shiver but it’s okay because it reminds him of doing the same once, walking barefoot on the sterile lawn at home on an uneasy summer’s afternoon while he tried to convince himself he belonged where he was, and his mother was cooking dinner and there was love and softness and the smell of pot-roast snorkelling through the kitchen window, and inside, his father was reading the newspaper with his feet up on the stool in front of him because he was tired after working a long week and there was more to come the next week, and he spoke over dinner about how life never stopped, how one day tumbled over another like they were in a game of chase, and if you didn’t seize hold of them, they’d pass you by, and when the kid heard him say it, he knew he had to leave, and he did, that very night, and ended up in the city in bare feet walking on icy grass while a blackbird chortles at him and he knows what it’s saying, that he should go home, go home, to where he’s loved and missed and broken hearts will be mended by prodigal’s return, then he steps on something sharp, a piece of glass, stuck in his flesh now, and when he pulls it out, there’s blood, and the pain cuts deep so he sucks in his breath and grits his teeth, and limps back to where he finds shelter, with the street girls and the new boys who’ve just come in from the country, and they look up to him and respect him because he’s been here so long, how long he can’t say, but the new boys need someone to show them the ropes, where to score the best dope and what johns to avoid, so maybe he’ll go home someday but the days tumble one after another and there’s never enough time, money, food, dope, sex, booze, love, but there is a sort of love here, the kind that’s born of weary, hand-me-down despair and being lost inside himself and crying out that there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, and that night, a rat licks the dried blood from the sole of his foot and he doesn’t bother to kick it away because he knows a kindred spirit when he sees it, and everyone needs to find their place in the world, even if they’re just city rats, a long way away from anything like home. 

 

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The writing and story possess a distinct tone of defiance that sets them apart. I appreciate how the author’s willingness to take risks paid off and how the themes of acceptance and social class interweaved seamlessly, resulting in a cohesive and compelling narrative.

Mustapha Enesi

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This feverish rewriting of Country Mouse/City Mouse with a queer undertone pays homage to young city lives in vivid prose. 

Camilla Grudova

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A winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2023, Jennifer McMahon’s words appear in The Irish Independent newspaper (New Irish Writing – upcoming, Feb 2023), the Oxford Prize Anthology, Heimat Review, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Books Ireland Magazine, Loft Books and the Retreat West Anthology (upcoming, 2023).

She has won both the Bray Literary Festival and the Books Ireland Magazine flash fiction competitions, and was a Top Ten Finalist in the Oxford Prize. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Anthology Short Story Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the Retreat West Short Story Prize, the Wild Atlantic Writing Awards, and the Women On Writing Flash Fiction Prize. Jennifer was also shortlisted for The Literary Consultancy Scholarship in 2022, and was longlisted in Fiction Factory’s Novel First Chapter competition, the Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize. She lives in Co. Wexford, Ireland.

Whooping cough. That was the first thing my sister gave me. Me, with my crushed-velvet flesh and sea creature fingers, her with thick bunches and dungarees. I was four months old but Mum fetched the story down so often I could almost smell the vomit-scent cellular blanket. Mum had to suck mucus from my nose with a plastic bulb and Mrs Evans – who never let us tread on her lawn, even when our ball went over – came to the end of her drive when the ambulance arrived just to watch because what else did you do in the ’80s? 

The doctors thought I might not live. 

And then there was the scar she gave me above my right eye. Swingball bat. I still see it coming towards me, her red face, spit on her lip. Afterwards she gave me the Chupa Chups lolly that Dad bought her from the hospital shop. I asked her once if she hit me on purpose and I expected her to laugh but she ran her long hair into her mouth and pulled it out in sharp wet points and asked if I wanted a wine. 

My sister gave me Mum. Well. She left her up for grabs when she took Dad and I mean, she took all of him. All of his eyes and thoughts and all the timid little hopes that we don’t expose to natural light. ‘Have you thought, Doll, about medicine?’ He always called her Doll even though her name was Sarah. He gave a lot of thought to what she might do when she grew up. He enjoyed travelling into imagined futures, framing her in different costumes. ‘What about law?’ 

‘I’d like to be a doctor, Dad.’ 

He looked at me like I was lost change. A spare sock. Sometimes I think she didn’t even want him, like carrying all that attention was too much for one person but she didn’t know how to set it down.

Mum worried a lot so, in that sense, my sister also gifted me medium-grade anxiety. 

Dad was there-not-there, like most dads in those days, until Sarah appeared. She could be doing anything or nothing, just reading a book upside down with her legs against the wall and he would laugh like she’d cracked a joke. Around Sarah he stopped being just a suit. ‘You kill me, Doll.’ 

‘I can do that too, Dad. Look!’ 

But unsuit-Dad was full up. ‘No one likes a show off,’ he’d say.

I gave her head lice. 

Twice.

We got older, passed stuff back and forth. Mascara. Mix tapes. Sometimes she bought my friends and I cider. One leather jacket. Dieting tips. She gave me 27 games of Shithead the night before they announced my exam results. Sterile bandages when things got too much and I tried to cut the worry out. I gave her space from Mum on come-down Sundays. She gave me my first spliff and my husband, Adam, who was her boyfriend first but I was young and thin and Fuck You then. 

Perhaps she didn’t give him to me. Perhaps I took him.

Sarah said she didn’t mind. She dyed her hair blue. Had another flirtation with dungarees. But sometimes later at family dinners I’d come into a room with only Adam and Sarah in it and she’d be playing her Dad trick. The happiness-giving. The grey-skin-sloughing. It made me envious, knowing that her secret talent was the Unclenching of Men. Perhaps he would have loved her like Dad did if I hadn’t got in the way. Perhaps, if he’d married her, Adam wouldn’t have left. 

My sister gave me my daughter. It turned out Mum and Dad only gave one of us a functioning womb, so she offered hers up because she wasn’t using it at the time. She said it like she was offering me her cowboy boots for a night. Brand new, never worn.

It was hard to watch her wobble around with her beach ball t-shirt and blue vein breasts knowing that she was carrying my baby. My body ached with it. I hid alcohol. Scrubbed surfaces with anti-bacterial spray. I wanted to lock her away from the world, from the whooping cough and rubella. Adam said I was turning into my mum. 

For a while, the three of us were a family. We whispered in awed tones about the future. We gave each other anticipation. Then, after Baby came and Adam left, me and Sarah gave each other red wine and tissues and endless watery coffee and gin and tissues and we hated each other in our same-same house with our missing love, but we poured ourselves into the tiny person who turned out to be a bit of us both. Sarah tried to rebuild the Lego-brick me without instructions, pulling her glasses onto her middle-aged nose like I was a problem she could solve. 

We got older. Our sister-love gifts got more extravagant. Cashmere jumpers. Badged handbags. Trips abroad. Finally, in an outrageous climax, we swapped organs. 

She gave me back my Lego-brick heart, fully rebuilt, devastatingly whole. 

I gave her a kidney. 

We watched as the machines cleaned her blood and pumped it through her. We took the drugs together. We lay in the same room with our sheets pulled up over our chests and our girl holding both our hands. 

‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said as they wheeled me into theatre. 

She can’t have liked all the things I gave her but she never said a thing. Even the neon scarf she wore at least once. Even the slippers that were a size too small because I forgot about her fallen arches.

Of all the gifts to reject, in the end it was this one her body returned. 

Never to be outdone, my fragile Lego heart – that she so carefully rebuilt – collapsed. Now I find myself rattling with sorrow, less than half the pair I once was.

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The intentional use of style in this story is impressive. I love the way in which the repetitive resonance creates a powerful effect. I also love the exploration of the body, which adds a layer of depth and richness to the narrative.  

Mustapha Enesi

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This lyrical piece encompasses an entire life in a page and a half, describing the dark and co-dependent existence of two sisters in eerie clockwork language. 

Camilla Grudova

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Originally from Leeds, now living in Devon, Abby Williams writes flash and longer fiction. She has won the Flash 500, Cranked Anvil’s short story competition and the Evesham Festival of Words short story prize. She placed third in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, was shortlisted for the New Writers Flash Competition, longlisted in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and twice longlisted in the Reflex Press flash fiction competition. She has stories in Popshot Quarterly and Riptide Journal. She recently achieved a distinction in her Creative Writing MA from the University of Exeter. She has a weird fascination with writing about family relationships. @scribblingabby
 

At the Arts Council Annual General Meeting, it was decided that all of the public art that was off display and held in storage should be distributed among the population, and shown in whatever way the people saw fit. Those who wished to host artwork entered a lottery system, paying a flat rate of £10.99.

One of Monet’s waterlily studies arrived with Linda and Tony, who were ecstatic, and hung it upside down in their dining room. It could be seen from the road, and the couple would take cups of tea out to street enthusiasts, peering in through the perpetually open curtains. In the dead of night, precisely eight months into displaying it, the painting crashed to the ground. Tony had underestimated the weight of the frame and didn’t hang it properly. Neither the canvas nor their elderly dog Steve recovered from the fall.

The Digby family received a Mondrian and were devastated, they hated it. When the unmarked van had arrived and unloaded the painting, they had pleaded with the driver to give it to someone else, but even the offer of £50 wouldn’t make him budge. They left it in its wrapping on the kitchen floor and ignored it, until one night when Hugh could no longer take it, and he grabbed a sharpie and coloured in-between the lines. He later told this as an act of somnambulant vandalism, but his wife Patricia knew the truth.

The Pritchard home received a Vermeer, and proudly placed it above the mantelpiece in their living room. Mr. Pritchard didn’t like it at all, but knew that it raised his status, and saw how happy it made his wife to charge strangers money to look at a painting they knew was valuable, even if it was a bit boring and just old people from the past.

Absolutely everyone wanted a Turner, but only Bob Salmon got one, and he struggled to find the right place to put it on his narrowboat. As he waited, unable to decide, it lay flat on a shelf. His cat, Binks, liked the high sides of the frame (they made her feel safe), and she leapt onto the canvas and started using it as a bed. Initially Bob was incapacitated by anxiety, but then concluded that it was probably safer as a cat bed than on display, especially as no-one had seen him go out to meet the delivery person on the frosty towpath.

A group of students in Bristol received Tracy Emin’s ‘My Bed’ and decided that really, all art is palimpsest, and it would be an act of radical creativity if they all got in it at once and refused to get out. None of them studied art, so it came as no surprise to everyone else that they all failed that year, though they had sweetly and hubristically believed that what they were doing was bigger than the institution.

A young couple in Hackney received a full Martin Creed sound installation, which was rather large and required them to build an extension to house it. Thanks to a tip-off from a neighbour, the Council found out about the unplanned works and took them to court, and confiscated the art. Several unique screws were removed and lost, and the work can no longer be assembled.

A Spanish teacher from Crewe received a Maggi Hambling painting, and about a week later, Maggi Hambling herself showed up and set fire to his home and was last seen resisting arrest somewhere near the M6 round junction 16.

The Mallik family desperately wanted a Warhol, and instead received Hockney’s Garrowby Hill. When it arrived, Mr. Mallik was disappointed, but his eldest daughter Samira found such vibrant charm and wit in it that by the end of the year, she had moved to Kirby Underdale so that she could see the real Garrowby Hill every day. One of her friends upon coming to stay remarked that the colours of Yorkshire were nothing like Hockney’s vision, and asked Samira if she regretted her move, and Samira realised her friend didn’t understand how art feels.

Mr. Piszczek received Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo and built a special shed in his garden for it. He was mesmerised by it, the Vantablack soothed him into a state of deep meditation. He stopped going to work, all he could think of was his own private abyss. One day he crept down there and realised it was the only place he was meant to be. Aware of the licensing limitations of Vantablack, he bought a dupe online, and painted everything he could need to live down there, and then began to tunnel under the shed, expanding his subterranean void into obsidian oblivion. 

In some ways, it was a good thing that the Arts Council had raised so much money through the lottery, as they had to recompense several institutions and individuals. At least twenty works of art were destroyed, some deliberate, others defined as acts of god by the insurance company who categorically refused to pay out. More than three hundred works were missing, and several hosts too. A retired dentist from Southampton was seen exiting the English Channel and heading into open water sitting atop one of Jeff Koons balloon dogs. She had placed a flag on the tail that read ‘LIVE’, which was all that remained when the dog was seen by satellite in the Pacific Garbage Patch.  

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I admire the cohesiveness of this story. The crisp sentences and vivid imagery complement each other beautifully, resulting in a fully immersive reading experience.

Mustapha Enesi

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Happy Little Accidents posses a rare and often overlooked quality in fiction: an original idea in an original voice. Balancing humour with social commentary, I am looking forward to what this new author writes next!

Camilla Grudova

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Meg Orpwood lives in Brooklyn with her three idiot cats, and writes about environmental science for a living. Her most prized possession is a plaster-cast of Nicolas Cage’s face, and she loves to arm wrestle though she rarely wins. She can be found on Twitter as @meg_orp, but be warned: her content is 99% cats.
 

We are thrilled to announce our short-list for the winter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023.

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

SHORT LISTED STORIES

Congratulations to everyone on the list who will be awarded publication and either a year of Art & Flash workshops, or a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

In the next week or two, we will be announcing our winners. So watch this space! 

We have exciting news for our next competition, which will be opening on the 1 June 2023. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

We are thrilled to announce our long-list for the winter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023.

Congratulations to all of the authors who reached the list and for all those who entered this round. As always, we saw a wonderful range of experience, genres, topics and stories from all over the world and it was hugely competitive. Many wonderful stories just missed the final list and for those we have permission to email – we will be letting you know! 

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

LONGLISTED STORIES

In the next week, we will be announcing our shortlist, who will be awarded publication and either a year of Art & Flash workshops, or a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

So watch this space! 

We have exciting news for our next competition, which will be opening on the 1 June 2023. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.