News

National Flash Fiction Day is celebrating its 10th Anniversary on Saturday, 26 June 2021!

To mark the occasion, we've upped the prizes for our annual Microfiction Competition and have a brand new theme for our next anthology...and submissions are now open for both!

2021 NFFD Microfiction Competition

We have a brand new team of judges for this year's Microfiction Competition; a huge welcome goes out to Rachael Dunlop, K M Elkes, Sharon Telfer and Alison Woodhouse who will be reading this year's submissions.

You can read more about the judges here, and of course, stay tuned for interviews with each of our judges and editors which we'll post in January and February 2021.

We've increased our prize pot this year, but have kept entrance fees and our 100-word limit the same. There is no theme for the Microfiction Competition; anything goes in terms of style, subject and theme. Please have a read of our Competition Guidelines and then send something our way!

2021 NFFD Anthology Submissions

The theme of this year’s National Flash Fiction Day anthology is… TA DA! MAGIC!

Charms, spells, rituals, supernatural effects, sleight of hand, conjuring, a mysterious quality of enchantment. The dictionary tells us magic can mean all these things.

Can you bring these qualities into a story in five hundred words or fewer?

Does the word magic conjure (sorry) something entirely different for you? Perhaps you can bring the world of magical realism to your story? Maybe Magic is one of your character's names. Perhaps you can enthral us with some magical technical wizardry in your writing?

Whatever illusion you trick us into believing, please submit your stories by 15th February 2021.

This year’s Guest Editor is Nod Ghosh who will be working alongside National Flash Fiction Day's own Santino Prinzi.  Read more about them here, and stay tuned for their interviews in early 2021.

Our submission process for the anthology has changed this year, so please have a read of our Anthology Submission Guidelines before submitting. We look forward to reading your work!

As we move to our new hosting, certain elements of our website may not work properly for a spell as we get everything up and running.  Please bear with us as we sort out the bits and bobs.   We hope to have everything back to normal soon.

We may have some intermittent downtime over the next few weeks.

Fear not; we're not going anywhere.  We're just fixing some bits and bobs behind the scenes....

We had to cancel our NFFD 2020 live event, so we've brought our celebration online. In our Flash Feast series, we've invited some flash superstars to share some videos and posts over the course of the weekend.

In this, our final Flash Feast of National Flash Fiction Day 2020 with Nik Perring, you can find out where we pinched the name for our 'Flash Feast' series.

Here is a link to Feast if you'd like to read along.

This wraps up our weekend of celebration for NFFD 2020.  Thank you so much to everyone who participated this year, and happy flash writing and reading throughout the year!

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Nik Perring is a short story writer and the author of five books. His work has appeared in many fine places all over the world including Smokelong, Word Riot, 3 :AM Magazine, and The Fiction Desk. His re-telling Little Red Riding Hood, Carmine’s Fruit, won the Artificum Short Story Prize. It’s also been read on the radio, performed on the stage, printed on fliers and appeared, with Dave Eggars’, on a High School Distance Learning course in the US.

He has published the books: I Met a Roman Last Night, What Did You Do? (EPS, 2006); Not So Perfect (RoastBooks, 2010); Freaks!, co-written with Caroline Smailes (TFP/HarperCollins, 2012), A Book of Beautiful Words: Some Meanings and Some Fictions Too (RoastBooks, 2014); and A Book of Beautiful Trees (RoastBooks, 2015).

Nik is also an editor and a teacher of writing, working with both and adults and children, working in primary schools, high schools, colleges, universities and the BBC.

Last year, at our 2019 National Flash Fiction Day event in Coventry, we shared some flash written on the theme of 'epiphany' by men at HMP Wandsworth who were participants of Safe Ground's Flash Fiction Project workshops.  We've published these over at our online journal, FlashFlood as part of our Safe Ground series.  We'd like to revisit these stories this year as part of our online celebration of flash fiction in the UK.

You can find all fourteen of these stories on FlashFlood here.

We now welcome Safe Ground Programmes Manager Lindsay Murphy who tells us a bit about the background and philosophy of Safe Ground's Flash Fiction Project...

Safe Ground is a national arts organisation delivering high quality services and interventions in both prison and community settings. Our programmes focus on relationships and identity and use group work and creative techniques for participants to experience alternative perspectives, develop empathy and self-awareness alongside skills and competencies. We challenge people and communities to do relationships differently.

As an arts organisation, Safe Ground relies on the use of artistic practices and techniques to inform and support our programme design, delivery and evaluation. Our methodologies promote reflection, realisation and revelations. They provide participants with platforms for change and routes into transitions. Throughout our programmes moments of clarity can occur, awareness and understanding of situations can be enhanced and participants can find themselves with a renewed sense of the self. Often, participants in our programmes begin or develop skills in performance, drama and creative writing.

Part of our organisational ethos has always been to work in partnership wherever possible and appropriate. Since 2015, Safe Ground is proud to have been in a relationship with Essex University and in 2017 we coordinated a creative writing workshop with the men at HMP Wandsworth.

It was agreed that ‘Epiphany’ was appropriate as a narrative theme, to support the groups to explore moments of change and transformation, which are inherent in the work we do. These epiphanies or turning points can provide moments of clarity but can also bring up an array of issues, dilemmas, decisions to be made and pathways to be pursued. Over two, two-day workshops, a total of 12 men participated and each produced a selection of short stories for submission. Participants ranged in age from 23 to 65 and brought with them a vast diversity of cultural, educational and life experience. The flash fiction pieces produced by participants denote an array of lightbulb moments, of points of sharp realisation, of transparency and revelation.

Our colleague and design partner on this project was Jonathan Crane who writes:

“When the opportunity to work with Safe Ground in the design and delivery of a creative writing workshop for HMP Wandsworth arose, I was studying towards a Ph.D. at the University of Essex. At that time, I had just been researching the concept of ‘Epiphany’ in relation to short stories, and exploring the flash fiction form. To my mind, these elements seemed ideally suited for a creative writing project in a prison setting.

Flash fiction, I felt, could provide the participants with a short, accessible form with which they could experiment. Then, with the concept of epiphany as a central theme for the workshops, the men could be encouraged to reflect on their own experiences, as well as to explore their own realizations and transformations. Yet, more than this, by introducing the idea of epiphany as a focal point of change within a narrative, we could provide a structure which would help the men shape their own flash fiction.

Using Safe Ground’s methodologies, the workshops provided a supportive forum not only for discussion, and for the expression of ideas and experiences, but also for the sharing of work. We encouraged the men to read out their work, and to give constructive feedback on the work of others. This process then fed into a session on editing and drafting stories during which the men worked collaboratively.

When I began this project, I had hoped to share some writing technique with the participants, and to introduce them to a form which might enable their self-expression. In short, I wanted to help them to write, and to have their voices heard. I little knew that the men would embrace flash fiction so keenly and create stories which ranged from the minimalist dramatic short, to the lyrical prose poem, from the poignantly personal to the surreally comic.

It was a privilege and a pleasure to work with Safe Ground and the men in HMP Wandsworth. The men’s eloquence and honesty, their openness to discuss their experiences and insights, as well as to share their stories, not only dismantled my own preconceptions about prison and life therein, but also taught me to appreciate the small things that we so casually take for granted.

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You can follow Safe Ground on Twitter @Safe_Ground.

In 2019, Makeda McMillan of Small Green Shoots took last year's NFFD Anthology theme of 'Doors' and developed it into a project called 'Glass Ceilings, Closed Doors' aimed at young men from her area, with a goal of developing flash and poetry 'pieces around the stereotypes and barriers they face being young, BME and from a deprived area that is spiking in terms of gun and knife crime'.

Makeda received funding from the Arts Council and delivered the project last year, and by last year's National Flash Fiction Day event in Coventry, she was able to share this video and these excerpts and images that came out of this project.

We are honoured that our 2019 anthology theme synergised with Makeda's project, and can think of no better way to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day than by taking time to read and listen to these young writers and artists.

You can find out more about Mikeda, her work and her project at https://www.makedamakes.co.uk/.

We have the same name, the same love of flash, and the same difficulties this year running our annual events due to Covid-19.  We're a completely separate organisation from National Flash Fiction Day New Zealand, but this year we're joining forces to celebrate flash fiction throughout the month.

Although most of NFFD UK's online celebration is condensed into this weekend, we'll be joining NFFD NZ for their events, which welcome flash fiction readers and writers from around the world. They are primarily celebrating on 22 June, but there are a number of things to look out for throughout the month.

Here's what's happening, though do check their events page for updates:

Online readings

• YouTube reading series – featuring new books, journal editors, youth readers, NFFD judges past and present, Bath novella-in-flash readings, City Chairs and more
• Micro Madness – June 1-22 micro readings from our annual international micro competition, with lockdown micros and no-theme micros – two per day!
• Book Day – June 15, celebrating books published in 2020 from around the world

Panel discussions

• The Language of Flash: A Roundtable with Journal Editors Around the World June 13, 9am NZ time – including:· Christopher Allen, Smokelong Quarterly (Germany)
  · Nuala O’Connor, Splonk (Ireland)
  · Grant Faulkner, 100 Words (US)
  · Meg Pokrass, New Flash Fiction Review (US)
  · Vaughan Rapatahana, Flash Frontier (Aotearoa New Zealand)
• Imagination Unbound: Five Women on the Poetic Narrative Form June 14, 4pm NZ time– including:· Helen Rickerby, author of How to live (AUP 2019)
  · Anne Kennedy, author of Moth Hour (AUP 2019)
  · Nod Ghosh, author of Filthy Sucre (Truth Serum Press 2020)
  · Diane Brown, author of Every now and then I have another child (OUP 2020)
  · Gail Ingram, author of Contents Under Pressure (Pukeko Publishing 2019)
• Best Small Fictions and Best Microfictions: an international reading June 20, 9am NZ time: a sampling of readers from the 2020 anthologies
• Youth Voices June 21, 9am NZ time – readings and discussion from youth entrants in the 2020 NFFD NZ youth competiton

The June 22 Online Awards Celebration
livestreamed!

We are also excited to see so many international writers in the volume this year, including the following from New Zealand: Johanna Aitchison, Anita Arlov, Melanie Dixon, Jan FitzGerald, Alison Glenny, Kamala Jackson, Heather McQuillan, Nod Ghosh, Cherllisha Silva, Kirsten Strom and Iona Winter. BSF will be released later this year -- watch for news!

More about Best Small Fictions on The Sonder Press website.

Join us from 7 – 10 pm BST for the virtual launch of the 2020 NFFD Anthology, Root, Branch, Tree.

Readings from the anthology will be posted on our YouTube channel and we’ll be celebrating with chat and virtual toasts on Twitter and our dedicated Facebook event. All welcome!

And of course, don't forget to pre-order the print edition or buy an ebook at the NFFD Bookshop!

National Flash Fiction Day has been celebrating flash since midnight, but Small Green Shoots is way ahead of us -- they have been celebrating all week!

National Flash Fiction Day and Small Green Shoots are sharing a common 'family' theme this year, and we're excited to see all the fantastic new work that has come out of this intensive week of creativity. Do have a look at everything that's going on; you can find links to everything via Instagram @smallgreenshoots and Twitter @smallgreensh00t.

Small Green Shoots is an arts organisation dedicated to running transformational arts projects to improve life chances for young people.  It was founded in 2009 with aim of giving young people from disadvantaged backgrounds an opportunity to engage with music and the arts, and to use these experiences as a springboard for their future. You can find out more about their story, their work, and ways to support them here.

Huge congratulations to everyone involved in Flash Fiction Week; let the celebrations continue!