Category: News

The Official NFFD 2024 Roadmap

What are you planning for NFFD?

Huge thanks...

Huge congratulations to Patricia Q. Bidar whose piece 'Cuttlefish' was chosen for the 2024 edition of Best Small Fictions.

This flash first appeared in Scratching the Sands: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2023 which is available in our Bookshop.

You can find out more about Best Small Fictions series here.

Congratulations again to Patricia Q. Bidar, and to all our 2023 National Flash Fiction Day Best Small Fictions and Pushcart Prize nominees!

National Flash Fiction Day is only a week away! 

We're preparing for a day of workshops and readings in Birmingham, but if you can't join us there, we have two free online workshops on offer on Saturday, 15 June 2024 via Zoom.  They're free, but places are limited.  Here's what's on offer and how to book....

9am - 10am BST (online): Audrey Niven of Propelling Pencil is running a free one-hour workshop from  based around the prompts at The Write-In.  This is aimed at writers wanting to give The Write-In a try.  Sign up here: https://thepropellingpencil.com/workshops/

11am - 12noon BST (online): Anita Goveas is giving a free one-hour workshop to everyone who wants to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day in flashy style.  You can reserve your space here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/national-flash-fiction-day-flash-fiction-workshop-tickets-907669924177

Our live event in Birmingham is sold out, but do keep checking the website as we release cancellations as soon as they come in.  Here is the link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/national-flash-fiction-day-2024-tickets-858859952237. And, if you live nearby, feel free to check in with us on the day for last-minute cancellations.

We're delighted to introduce the title and cover of our newest anthology, Tiny Sparks Everywhere: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2024.  It will launch on 15 June 2024, but you can pre-order here.

Thanks to Jennifer Brutschy, author of the eponymous story and to our artist-in-residence Jeanette Sheppard who provided the cover image.

We're excited to share the anthology itself with you in less than a month!

We are delighted to announce that FlashFlood will be open for submissions from 12:01 a.m. BST on Sunday, 21 April to 23:59 BST on Saturday, 27 April 2024.

You can read our submission guidelines here, and read about this year's editors here.

We're looking for submissions of up to 300 words on any theme.  (Shorter pieces are very welcome; there is no minimum word count.)  We are happy to read up to three pieces per author per year.

We are happy to consider previously published work as long as it was published before 2022, you give us full publication details, and you retain rights to republish.   We consider all previously unpublished pieces for award nominations; we nominate for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction and Best of the Net.

Please note that we do not accept AI generated work at this time.  Whilst we appreciate that AI can come up with some very interesting things, we have a very human team of editors volunteering their precious and limited time.  We simply don't have the resources to deal with a deluge of AI generated work.  Please be kind to our editors by only submitting work that you yourself have written.

To celebrate National Flash Fiction Day 2024, we're hosting a live event in Birmingham on Saturday, 15 June 2024, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. BST.

Join us for two flash workshops, a panel presentation and the launch of the 2024 NFFD Anthology, complete with readings from some of this year's authors.

You can read more on our events page and you can book your ticket here (on EventBrite), but hurry -- space is limited and we expect to sell out.

Tickets are free, but donations are very gratefully received.

And the results are in!

Huge congratulations to our winning and highly commended authors (listed alphabetically by story title):

• First Prize: ‘Frost Fair’ by Josie Turner
• Second Prize: ‘The Attempts of Arlo, Age 9, to Create a Shooting Star After Learning They Are Just Rocks Moving Very Fast’ by Leila Murton Poole
• Third Prize: ‘Sex, Sighs and Masking Tape’ by Chris Cottom
• Highly Commended: ‘Everyone Said It Was Pointless Trying to Date a Girl Obsessed With Marine Arthropods but I Had to Find out for Myself’ by Rebecca Field
• Highly Commended: ‘Granny’s Biggest Handicraft Project to Date’ by Anne Howkins
• Highly Commended: ‘I imagine the Sun Changing Its Mind’ by Sarah Barnett
• Highly Commended: ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ by Sherry Morris
• Highly Commended: ‘Pearls on His Kurta’ by Sudha Balagopal
• Highly Commended: ‘Stars and Stripes, 1945’ by James Montgomery
• Highly Commended: ‘When We Were Young’ by Suzanne Hicks

The winning and highly commended stories can be read here and will appear in the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology.

Thank you again to our four judges: Sara Chansarkar, Jan Kaneen, David Rhymes and Alison Wassell.

Congratulations again to all our prize-winning and highly commended authors, and to all those who were shortlisted. And, a big thank you to everyone who entered this year’s competition and trusted us with their stories.

After reading scads of brilliant stories on the theme of AIR, EARTH, WATER AND FIRE, editors Karen Jones and Sara Hills have finalised their selections for the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and for the third annual Editors' Choice Awards.

Below is the list of the stories that will appear in this year's anthology, alongside the 2024 Microfiction Competition winners (yet to be announced).  We will be contacting everyone on the list via email, so you should hear from us soon if you haven't already, but in the meantime, congratulations to all the authors listed below.

Special congratulations to our two Editors' Choice Award Winners:

• Sara Hills chose 'White Noise' by Rosaleen Lynch
• Karen Jones chose 'Containers for Smoky Memories' by Lisa Ferranti

Thank you so much to everybody who submitted their stories for consideration for this year's anthology. It was an honour to read each and every piece.  Thank you for sharing your work with us!  If you didn't make the anthology this time, don't forget that there are still opportunities to join us in celebrating National Flash Fiction Day, including FlashFlood and The Write-In.

We hope that you will all join us for the launch of the anthology on National Flash Fiction Day later this year!

2024 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Line Up

• Air Bubbles by Slawka G. Scarso
• Arctic Convoys by Angi Holden
• Baste, Bind, Burn by Nan Wigington
• Big Guy by Frances Gapper
• Blown Apart by Kim Steutermann Rogers
• Containers for Smoky Memories by Lisa Ferranti
• Cyrtanthus Ventricosus by Sonora Hills
• Dragon Girl by Stephanie Carty
• Elements of Goodbye by Karen Crawford
• English Towns Flooded After Heavy Rainfall by Hetty Mosforth
• Fifth Element in Paternity Confusion Shocker by Adam Trodd
• From Tiny Acorns by Helen Chambers
• Gaia is Going Through the Menopause by Alison Woodhouse
• Hollowware by Ali McGrane
• Hybrid by Michelle Walshe
• Hypoxia by Jo Gatford
• Incineration is Not Obliteration by Anne Howkins
• In Memory of Empedocles by Tina M Edwards
• In Search of Dara Amongst the Lost Cillini of County Mayo by Helen Kennedy
• It May Be a Biblical Site, but if the Rain Doesn’t Come, No one Will Be Singing by Emma Phillips
• Mr Porter Rakes Leaves in the Park by Cheryl Markosky
• My Father the Elementalist by Steven Patchett
• My Husband Was a Snow-capped Mountain by Anita Goodfellow
• My Son is a Gull, a Black Iris by Angela Joynes
• My Son is a Sieve by Melissa Flores Anderson
• Namazu the Earthshaker by Andy Lavender
• Off a Duck’s Back by Jupiter Jones
• Passing Places by Sharon Telfer
• Puppy Love and Biblioclasm by Edward Barnfield
• Pyre by Jenna Muiderman
• Quintessence by Marie Gethins
• Rain Dancing by Maria Thomas
• Reasons to Rescue Strangers by Judy Darley
• Something New to Worry About by Andrea Marcusa
• Stepping Stones by Slawka G. Scarso
• Still Life by Anne Daly
• Stone Nest by Catherine Ogston
• Swiftly, Swiftly Over Ice by Linda M. Bayley
• Tally by Marissa Hoffmann
• The Dawning by Audrey Niven
• The Digging of Small Holes by Debra A. Daniel
• The Elephant by Sharon D. Sheltzer
• The Heaviness of Sleep by Talia Nash
• The Jigsaw Puzzle by Sumitra Singam
• The Marriage Mandala by Eleonora Balsano
• The Night Ledger by Elizabeth Fletcher
• The Outside Lane by Jude Higgins
• The Piano in the Room by Sarah Leavesley
• They Sold the Sky by Kate Axeford
• Tiny Sparks Everywhere by Jennifer Brutschy
• Today and Tomorrow by Karen Whitelaw
• Waiting for the Earth to Put On Its Breaks by Sally Reiser Simon
• When Finley Davey Said He'd Turn Into a Cicada by Emma Phillips
• When the Kingfisher Dives by Eleanor Luke
• White Noise by Rosaleen Lynch

This year, we were thrilled to receive 419 entries to the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Fiction Competition.

Our judges, Sara Chansarkar, Jan Kaneen, David Rhymes and Alison Wassell had the difficult job of whittling down the stories to a shortlist of 30. This was no easy task and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their hard work and for the speed and conscientiousness with which they carried out the judging.

It isn’t easy to tell a story in a 100 words, yet we were blown away by the variety of themes, subjects and styles we saw in the submissions. Thank you to everyone who sent in their work; we appreciated the chance to read your flash.

If you see your flash below, feel free to tell everyone, but as judging is still in place please do not reveal your title.

Now, without further delay, our 30 shortlisted stories are:

• A Last Look Inside My Mother’s Purse
• A Woman of:
• Above the water line
• After Looking Through My Ex-Husband’s Trash
• Baba Yaga Encounters her Ex outside Lidl
• Cupidity
• Drifting
• Entanglement
• Everyone Said It Was Pointless Trying to Date a Girl Obsessed With Marine Arthropods But I Had to Find Out for Myself
• Fourteen Days After You’re Gone
• From her Kitchen Garden Olha Ostapivna Waits and Watches the Sky
• Frost Fair
• Granny’s Biggest Handicraft Project to Date
• Here is My Body
• I imagine the sun changing its mind
• ‘Language!’
• Mom Was a Joyful Drunk
• On Becoming a Mother
• Our Ghost
• Pandora’s Box
• Paradise by the Dashboard Light
• Pearls on His Kurta
• Sex, Sighs and Masking Tape
• Stars and Stripes, 1945
• The Attempts of Arlo, Age 9, To Create a Shooting Star After Learning They Are Just Rocks Moving Very Fast
• The Matter with Clouds
• The separation of sunsets
• Thursday
• What if I Never Actually Liked the Eagles
• When we were young

There's still time to submit to the 2024 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and the 2024 Microfiction Competition, but be quick — our submission window closes tonight at 11:59pm GMT!

For the 2024 Anthology, we're looking for flash up to 500 words on the theme is – AIR, EARTH, WATER AND FIRE.  Your work will be read by editors Karen Jones and Sara Hills.  Selected work will be published in our 2024 print/ebook anthology and be considered for our Editors' Choice Awards which come with a £50 prize.  You can read our submission details here.

For our Microfiction Competition, we're looking for flash of up to 100 words.  There is no theme.  Your work will be read by judges Sara Chansarkar, Jan Kaneen, David Rhymes and Alison Wassell.  Winners and runners-up will receive cash prizes and be published online and in our print/ebook anthology.  Full submission details can be found here.

Each project accepts submissions from writers anywhere in the world.

Our Anthology and Microfiction Competition teams look forward to reading your work!