Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

From all of us at Fish, thank you for sharing your poems with us. 

Congratulations to all whose poems were short-listed and long-listed—and a special well done to the ten winners whose poems will appear in the Fish Anthology 2026. 

Billy Collins lent his considerable wisdom and expertise to judging and our thanks to him is heart-felt,

We’re delighted to invite you to the anthology launch at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry.
Venue: Marino Church
Date: 14 July
Time: 6.00 pm

This is a free event, and all are very welcome. We hope you can join us for what promises to be an enjoyable evening of readings and celebration.

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Winners

Here are the winning poems, as chosen by Billy Collins, to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2026.

Find below more about the winning poets.

 

 

AUTHOR	TITLE
1st prize Robin Schwarz	A Letter to Neruda
2nd prize Maria McLeod	A Destiny We Welcomed
3rd prize Houman Qavidel	After the Horse
7 HONORARY MENTIONS (no particular order)
Alan Coombe	Playing Bowls with Virginia Woolf
Jan Norton	In the Coffee Shop Thinking about Churches
Allen Shadow	Chinese Prints
Ross Gillett	Hamburg
Jody Hartkopp	My mother
DIana Cant	Experimental
Isi Unikowski	Confined by you I count myself a king

 

About the Winners
BIOS:

Robin Schwarz completed her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in the Cumberland Poetry Review, The Oberon Poetry Review, The Hampden-Sydney Review and several others. She is the author of 3 novels with her third, Coming Up for Air, due out in June. As an aside, when she was in Santiago touring Neruda’s house. she asked the guide if she could lay down in Neruda’s bed. The guide said yes. There was a giant photo of Neruda over the bed. She asked her guide to take a picture. When she rose, she turned and said, “now I can say I slept with Pablo Neruda.”

Maria McLeod’s writing has been published by literary journals in the England, Germany, India, Scotland and the U.S. She’s won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Quarter after Eight Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize, and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Publications include “Skin. Hair. Bones.” and “Mother Want,” poetry chapbooks. She serves as an associate professor for Western Washington University in the Pacific Northwest, USA. On Instagram @mariapoempics.    

Houman Qavidel is an independent Iranian filmmaker, musician, writer, and poet. He has directed three short films and released an album in 2025 titled Letters to You. His works draw from lived experience. After the death of his father, a quiet personal loss, and the passing of his oldest friend — his dog — he took to the roads to write through grief while traveling. And he is still wandering.”

Alan Coombe has lived in London for decades, but remains at heart a Cornishman, hefted to coast and sea. With the encouragement of his wife, Lucy, he has come to writing poetry late in life, after working as a potter, a social worker, and in senior roles in child welfare practice, policy and government-influencing; all underpinned by a lifetime of reading and love of music. He has since been placed and published in several competitions.

Jan Norton is a poet brought up in the South Wales Valleys but has lived in Nottingham for over forty years. Her debut pamphlet, Relief Map, is published by Five Leaves Press. She  has had poems in The North, Ink Sweat and Tears, and The Lampeter Review, and been successful in numerous poetry competitions, including winning the Ilkley Poetry Festival’s Robert Swan Prize,  and highly commended or longlisted in others, including Mslexia and Poetry Wales.

Allen Shadow’s poetry has appeared widely in journals such as Constellations, The I-70 Review, The Broadkill Review, BoomerLitMag, and Poetry International. Praised by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as “engaging” and cited by Library Journal for “startling imagery,” his work has been recognized in numerous national and international competitions, including the Bridport, Bedford, Neruda, Fish Publishing, and Emily Dickinson prizes. His chapbooks include Harlem River Baby and America, I’ll Have My Way With You.

Ross Gillett lives with his wife Julie Phillips on Dja Dja Wurrung country in Daylesford in the central highlands of Victoria, Australia. He has won a number of Australian awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His books The Mirror Hurlers and Swimmer in the Dust are available from Puncher and Wattmann, and a collection of new and selected poems, Drift, is scheduled for release by the same publisher late in 2026.

Jody Hartkopp is an artist and poet who frequently mixes her memories of growing up isolated in rural America and her Lithuanian heritage. Her work tends towards collage and seeks to understand the centrifugal force that will hold together her seemingly unrelated obsessions. She is a recent MFA graduate from Boston University and currently lives a nomad’s life.

Diana Cant’s poems have been published in various anthologies and magazines. She has published two pamphlets, Student Bodies, 1968, (Clayhanger Press) and At Risk – the lives some children live (Vole Books). She was a Forward Prize nominee in 2023, and won the Plaza Poetry Prize, 2023.  Her debut collection, I make you bird, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. She is a joint editor of The Alchemy Spoon.

Isi Unikowski lives in Canberra, Australia.  He has been widely published in Australia and overseas, including Best of Australian Poems 2022. His collections ‘Kintsugi’ (2022) and ‘Re:Vision’ (2025) are published by Puncher & Wattman, New South Wales.  His published poetry can be viewed at https://www.isiunikowski.net.

 

 

 

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Short-list of 46

In alphabetical order (1,706 entries in total)

AUTHOR	POEM TITLE
Adam Brannigan	By the fourth cockcrow
Alan Coombe	Playing Bowls with Virginia Woolf
Allen Shadow	Chinese Prints
Allen Shadow	Pony Ride
Annie Mondegreen	Every Night I Sleep Beneath the Walnut Tree
Arno Daniel	this life
Ayla Gard	Sestina for a Dead Lover
Billy Fenton	Dig
Brandy Reinke	Peeled
Catherine Higgins-Moore	In memory of simpler times
Charlie Brice	Graham Thinks
Colette Colfer	Origami
David Hughes	Pressure Without Grammar
Derval Walsh	To L. Cohen (Hydra, 27 May 2025)
Diana Cant	Experimental
Emma Neale	The Dressmaker’s Story
Hilary McDaniel	Other Way of Hearing
Holly Aylett	Our Cleansing
Houman Qavidel	After the Horse
Houman Qavidel	Field of Distance
Houman Qavidel	Mother
Isi Unikowski	Confined by you I count myself a king
Jacqui Ritchie	Your Coat
James Allan Kennedy	Today I Killed My Cat
James Lowell	The Hopi Reed Basket
James Lowell	Prolepsis
James Lowell	The Trickster Wren
Jan Norton	In The Coffee Shop Thinking About Churches
Jeff Walt	Mercy Room
Jody Hartkopp	My Mother
Jon Hart	VPN
Joyce Schmid	An Echo of the Passion Holding Star to Star
Judith Allnatt	Things Taken from my Dead Mother
Kevin MacAlan	Craft
Liz Houchin	Mass on a Monday
Maria McLeod	A Destiny We Welcomed
Pratibha Kumari	What the Heron Knows About Silence
Rajendra Prasad Guptar	The Mathematics of Rain
Robin Schwarz	Fire in the Palisades
Robin Schwarz	A Letter to Neruda
Ross Gillett	Hamburg
S.A. MacLeod	Lament for H.
Sarah Black	Dear Sister, after Emma Trelles
SHARON HIER	Cwm Du
Sinéad Griffin	Finding Summer
Sumit Kumar	The Difference Between Forgetting and Letting Go

 

 

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Long-list of 197

In alphabetical order (1,706 entries in total)

 

AUTHOR	POEM TITLE
Adam Brannigan	By the fourth cockcrow
Adrian Blackledge	Blues
Alan Coombe	Playing Bowls with Virginia Woolf
Alessandro Focardi de Ritter	Syntagma Nights
Alex Radogna	Death feels like a surprise party
Allen Shadow	Chinese Prints
Allen Shadow	Pony Ride
Allen Shadow	Are You Even Here
Allen Shadow	Crossed Bronx
Allen Shadow	God Was Afraid
Allen Shadow	I Crossed You
Allen Shadow	Was It a Dream?
Allen Shadow	We Didn’t Murder All the Lovely Girls
Alvy Carragher	Vantage Point
André Chung	Stretched Sonnet ¨Regeneration¨
André Chung	Speech from verse drama: Ït little profits that a spoilt bourgeois¨
André Chung	Fragment of long poem, “Prep School Job Market Rumors
Andy Craven-Griffiths	Subjunctive sister
Andy Drane	Number 19 (the cancer bus)
Ann Shenfield	Thud
Annie Mondegreen	Every Night I Sleep Beneath the Walnut Tree
Anthony Knight	FROM THE MADHOUSE
Arno Daniel	this life
Arno Daniel	Bounty
Arno Daniel	Boarders
Arno Daniel	The Table
Ayla Gard	Sestina for a Dead Lover
Bernadette Lynch	Not at Tom’s Funeral
Bernadette Lynch	Afterwards
Billy Fenton	Dig
Brady Fauth	Lungenzug
Brady Fauth	Letter to a celebrity I will never meet
Brandy Reinke	Peeled
Brenda Fitzpatrick	After Curfew
Brenda Fitzpatrick	When you read the news..
Brett Reid	The Trolley
brooke james	So Long, ChatBot
Carole Cloud	I See You Hiding
Carolyn Gillespie	Mother
Carolyn Gillespie	Line of Flow
Catherine Higgins-Moore	In memory of simpler times
Chantal Galvin	The Done Thing
Charlie Brice	Graham Thinks
Chloe Daniel	Mourning for a friend’s mother
Chloe Orrock	Among the stars
Ciarán Parkes	Her Phthisical Husband
Clif Mason	“The Fiction Writer”
Clint King	The Nest
Colette Colfer	Origami
Corinna Leigh-Turner	Beneath the Horizon
Damen O’Brien	Other People’s Glasses
Dave Thomas	the cherub
David Hughes	Pressure Without Grammar
David Hughes	Held Weather
Deirdre Anne Hines	The Picnic Table
Deirdre DuVally	Christmas Gift
Derval Walsh	To L. Cohen (Hydra, 27 May 2025)
Diana Cant	Experimental
Diana Cant	Bearing witness
Diana Cant	Signs of slippage
Doreena Jennings	Motherly Wisdom
Elena Croitoru	The Bathing Hour
Elena Croitoru	Maybe only God sees us daydreaming
Elizabeth Oxley	This Morning in Carriage E
Elizabeth Oxley	Watching Wooster
Elizabeth Whyatt	Childhood
Emelia Jones	The Missing Piece
Emma Neale	The Dressmaker’s Story
Francesca La Nave	FOR THE SAVING OF WORMS
Francesca La Nave	FAREWELL TO A LOVER
Francesca La Nave	HANGING MAN
Ger O’Sullivan	Object
Gerry O’Donnell	Prefab Jungle
Gerry O’Donnell	Songbird
Glenn Moss	“Summer, Rogue River”
Helen E. Crampton	becalmed
Helen Pinoff	Comfort Food
Hilary McDaniel	Other Way of Hearing
Holly Aylett	Our Cleansing
Houman Qavidel	After the Horse
Houman Qavidel	Field of Distance
Houman Qavidel	Mother
Isi Unikowski	Confined by you I count myself a king
Jacqui Ritchie	Your Coat
Jacqui Ritchie	Japanese Maple
Jacqui Ritchie	Three Saplings on the Side of  the Motorway
James Allan Kennedy	Today I Killed My Cat
James Lowell	The Hopi Reed Basket
James Lowell	Prolepsis
James Lowell	The Trickster Wren
James Lowell	The New Hell Gate Fire Station
James Lowell	The Sacred Chicken
James Lowell	The Zamboni Affair
James Lowell	Wittgenstein’s Cave
James Lowell	Hegel’s Garage
James Lowell	The Little Wolf in Me
James Lowell	Playing Darts with B. Einstein
James Lowell	Root Fire
James Lowell	The Remnants of Him
James Lowell	Whale Watch
James Lucas	Minotaur
James Lucas	Arachne
Jan Norton	In The Coffee Shop Thinking About Churches
Janice Booth	Who’s Going to Make the Gravy Now?
jean Tuomey	Broth
Jeff Walt	Mercy Room
Jessamyn Fairfield	Catastrophic Moult
Jimmy O’Keefe	Morning Prayer
Jimmy O’Keefe	So Much Language In the Mouth
Joanna Colley	Lest Ye Be Judged
Jody Hartkopp	My Mother
John Beaton	Sinister Spinsters
John Donaghy	Last Rite
John Lazarus	The Growth of Wisdom
Jon Hart	VPN
Jonathan Greenhause	Face Down in a Jailcell Drifting at Sea
Joost van Gijzen	Hope is no alternative
Joyce Schmid	An Echo of the Passion Holding Star to Star
Judith Allnatt	Things Taken from my Dead Mother
Julia Mason	Dissolution
Kate Fox	Still Life with John Prine
Kate Fox	Marking Time
Katie Beswick	Freethinking Decadence
Katie Beswick	Glosa on Larkin’s The Trees
Kevilina Burbank	The Professor
Kevilina Burbank	I decided, finally: fuck the long poem
Kevin MacAlan	Craft
Laura Jan Shore	That Fleet Season
Laura Jan Shore	A Kind of Marriage
Leonora O’Brien	FKU Good Mother Test
les stuart jones	Curlew suite
Liz Byrne	I hear
Liz Houchin	Mass on a Monday
Liza Duncan	Because
Lou Lesovitch	Curlew
Louise Larkinson	In Praise Of Radiotherapy
Lydia Kennaway	Incident
Marco Patitucci	At the six o’clock meeting
Margaret Rochford	Composed in the Dark
Maria McLeod	A Destiny We Welcomed
Marian Brannigan	Monastery Garden
Marian Brannigan	Nature Lesson
Mary Anne Woolf	Blood and Soil
Mary Mulholland	Altar
Mia Nelson	Dostoyvesky
Michael McKimm	Love poem with animals
Michael Swan	Brassens Le Testament
Michelle Elvy	Waterways
Miles Larmour	Anything
Nina Gross	Many Ways to Greet the Spirit
Ockert Greeff	I Do to You
P. W. Bridgman	I Offer You What I Also Abide
Paddy Moran	Delivery
Paola Bruni	You Carry the One You Never Knew
Paris Rosemont	Emergency Contact: NIL
Patricia Barone	My Creased Map
Patricia Barone	The Window Bed
Patricia Wallace	During the Frick’s Long Renovation
Patrick Cotter	anois, agus ar uair ár mbáis
Paul Sutherland	Gentle Dissolves
Peter Borchers	Monday
Peter Borchers	My mother is ninety-two
Pratibha Kumari	What the Heron Knows About Silence
Rajendra Prasad Guptar	The Mathematics of Rain
Regan Calmer	Schweineschnitzel
Richard Mott	My Face at Fifty
Robert E. Shapiro	Window
Robert Lewis	The ship of Theseus
Robin Schwarz	Fire in the Palisades
Robin Schwarz	A Letter to Neruda
Roger Bonner	Lost Gloves
Ross Gillett	Hamburg
Ross Gillett	Postcard
Ross Gillett	Door Handle Houses
Ruth Bardon	Paper Streets
Ruth Rosengarten	I am thinking
Ruth Rosengarten	If you’d gone to live in Lisbon in the 1980s
S.A. MacLeod	Lament for H.
S.A. MacLeod	Dad as Burning Dodgem
Sally Worthing	Peace Rose
Salya Shaban	For The One whose infinite mercy Flows Like the River
Salya Shaban	A Summer Song In Spring
Sam Szanto	My Goddess Daughter
Sarah Black	Dear Sister, after Emma Trelles
Sarah Black	Cold Little Rockpool
SHARON HIER	Cwm Du
Sinéad Griffin	Finding Summer
Snehal Amembal	Chakli
Sophie Grimes	The Shape of Time
Stef Pixner	The Wheel
Stephanie Feeney	ABOUT THE TOAST
Stephanie Feeney	MARMALADE
Sumit Kumar	The Difference Between Forgetting and Letting Go
Susan Kress	Disappearing Acts
Tara Connor	The God of 3:00 AM and The Moonlight Tether, or How I Make Sure You Come Home to Me
Veronica A. Bettencourt	Guided Imagery
Zell Ping	The Woman Who Changes Sheets

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

From all of us at Fish, thank you for sharing your Haiku with us. The Fish Haiku Prize has been a joy. So many pearls.

Congratulations to all poets who were short-listed and long-listed—and a special well done to the ten winners whose Haiku will appear in the Fish Anthology 2026. A particular shout out to C.P.Nield, who had three of his Haiku selected. In order to ensure that 10 Haiku poets are showcased in the Fish Anthology 2026, judge Mary-Jane Holmes has nudged two Haiku from her short-list to join the winners.

We’re delighted to invite you to the anthology launch at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry.
Venue: Marino Church
Date: 14 July
Time: 6.00 pm

This is a free event, and all are very welcome. We hope you can join us for what promises to be an enjoyable evening of readings and celebration.

---

 

Winners

Here are the winning Haiku, as chosen by Mary-Jane Holmes, to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2026.

Find below, notes on the winning Haiku from Mary-Jane and more about the winning poets.

 

AUTHOR	TITLE
Susan Richardson	DAWN / ON THE ROAD
Alan Bleakley	Chough
Emma Dandy	Pinprick scars
Caroline Clark	Day Case
C.P. Nield	Seal Pod, Ostend The Blue Rigi Life Cycle
Ayla Gard	Haiku for Nana Watanabe Shrimp Earrings
Richard Godden	Hares
Michael Henry	Dead gull on the road
Seth Rhoades	Moonlight Intuition:
Lois Woestman	Offering

 

Notes by Mary-Jane Holmes on the Winning Haiku

Across these twelve poems, what stands out first is the astonishing elasticity of the haiku form. Taken together, they demonstrate that contemporary haiku is no longer confined to inherited ideas of seasonal observation, serenity, or strict syllabic discipline. Instead, these poems move confidently between lyric compression, visual experiment, grotesque comedy, painterly image-making, and emotional fracture. Some honour the traditional shape of haiku while radically modernising its subject matter; others dismantle the architecture altogether while preserving the essential haiku instinct: the sudden illumination of a moment.

What impressed me most was the range of tonal daring. There is tenderness beside absurdity, violence beside buoyancy, and high lyricism beside colloquial speech. “Seal Pod, Ostend” revels in sumptuous sound-play — “blubbery lubbers” and “velvet slabs” — while “The Flying Handbag” explodes with theatrical camp and comic swagger. “The Blue Rigi” condenses an entire theory of painting into a tiny imagist fragment, transforming Turner’s mark-making into “fingernail” scratches across the morning. “Pinprick scars” stretches the visual field of the page itself, using spacing and fracture as part of the poem’s emotional syntax. The selection demonstrates that the contemporary haiku can absorb influences from concrete poetry, surrealism, performance, social realism and prose poetry without losing its essential identity.

The strongest entries also shared an exceptional command of imagery. These poems understand that haiku succeeds not through explanation but through precision. Again and again, a single visual detail opens into something larger: horses “grazing their long shadows”; pigeons pecking at sashimi beside a snapped neck; vermillion shrimp earrings transformed into a lonely underwater troupe. The best of these poems trust the image completely. They do not overstate or interpret; they allow resonance to accumulate naturally in the reader’s mind.

What ultimately distinguished the top three poems for me, however, was the way each expanded the possibilities of what a haiku can contain.

“Day Case”achieves something extraordinary in its emotional economy. In just seventeen syllables it implies an entire narrative: illness, surgery, survival, recovery, identity, and the fragile return of pleasure. “One breast less” is devastatingly direct, but the poem refuses to remain inside grief. Instead, it pivots lightly toward delight in “these new sandals / golden on my feet.” What moved me most was this buoyancy — not forced optimism, but a genuine re-emergence into the sensory world. The poem carries enormous emotional weight while remaining airy and alive. It understands that joy can coexist with loss, and that tension gives the poem its power.

“Life Cycle” fascinated me because of its experimental boldness. Formally, it fractures syntax and lineation almost to breaking point: “brakes / neck / nine pigeons peck / sashimi.” Yet despite this disruption, the poem remains deeply faithful to the haiku ethos of immediacy and observation. The poem unfolds through brutal cinematic cuts, creating a compressed urban ecology of labour, violence, scavenging and consumption. The juxtaposition of the Deliveroo rider, broken body, pigeons and sashimi produces a darkly contemporary nature poem. Its experimentation never feels decorative; the fractured form embodies the collision and disorientation at the heart of the scene.

“Haiku for Nana Watanabe Shrimp Earrings”, appealed to me because of how subtly it subverts expectations of haiku. It does not radically disrupt metre or typography. Instead, its rebellion lies in its luxuriant verbosity. Haiku is often associated with spareness and linguistic austerity, but this poem indulges in opulence: “Dangling vermillion organdie” is almost extravagantly textured. The language risks excess yet remains controlled through the poem’s strange underwater loneliness. The movement from fashion object to isolated sea-creature to “fleshy human lobe” creates a surreal but emotionally coherent transformation. I admired the confidence of a poem willing to push the form toward richness rather than reduction.

These three poems ultimately stood above the others because each, in very different ways, enlarged my understanding of the haiku form. One achieved profound emotional narrative through clarity and lightness; one reinvented the form through fragmentation; one challenged assumptions about minimalism through verbal abundance. Together, they demonstrate that the haiku remains not a fixed tradition but a living, mutable art.

 

About the Winners
BIOS:

Emma Dandy writes to explore the fragmentation of identity after trauma. Publication of her debut pamphlet ‘I Laid Out Knives, Guns and Razors’ is forthcoming with Hedgehog Press. Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Strange Daze, Eche Poetry and Poetry Worth Hearing. Emma was longlisted in the New Writers Flash Fiction Competition 2026 and is researching a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She’s on Instagram @emmadandypoetry

Dr Alan Bleakley is an Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities, author of 25 academic books and a widely published poet with eight collections, most recently The Cost of Living, a collaboration with Dr Shane Neilson (2025, The Artel Press). His poetry focuses on the ‘bio-illogical’ or unseen nature. He lives with his wife Sue, a visual artist, at the far west of Cornwall amongst granite outcrops and neolithic burials. He is a keen surfer.

C.P. Nield’s poetry has appeared in New Poetries IV (Carcanet), Footprints (Broken Sleep Books) and Christmas Tree (Candlestick Press), as well as journals such as PN Review, The Spectator, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, The North and Magma. Among a range of prizes, he has been shortlisted for The London Magazine poetry prize in 2014 and 2023, and longlisted for the 2022 National Poetry Competition. He works as a marketing copywriter helping charities raise money.

Caroline Clark has published three books: Saying Yes In Russian, Agenda Editions; Sovetica and Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes, both with CB editions. She has a recent story and a podcast interview on the Fictionable site. Later in 2026 Black Herald Press will publish What Lies Ahead and Other Essays. She lives in Lewes, England, and works as a community interpreter.

Ayla Gard writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry about the tangles between humans and the natural world. Her work appears in Orion Magazine, Scientific American, Barnstorm Journal and Pile Press. She has an MFA in nature writing and MA in poetry from Western Colorado University. Originally from a rural mountain in Australia, she lives in Los Angeles with her daughter where she works in climate comms and is revising a novel. Find her at aylagard.carbonmade.com

Seth Rhoades is a Visiting Instructor of English at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama, where he teaches composition, speech, literature, and creative writing. He is a longtime member of the university’s creative writing community, serving as President of the Writers’ Club and Editor-in-Chief of the university literary journal, Something Else, as a student. Seth enjoys writing poetry and speculative fiction that incorporate themes of mental health, identity, and environmentalism.

Susan Richardson’s poems, stories and articles have appeared in various magazines, anthologies and books.  Susan recently won runner-up in the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation poetry competition.  For many years, she was the editor and publisher of anthologies compiling the literature of current-day poets, fiction writers and memoirists.  She now works as a painter and jewelry maker and lives in Boise, Idaho, with her husband George, a chess teacher and tournament director.

Michael Henry was born in Liverpool and grew up in Cheltenham. He emigrated to Western Canada for thirteen years. He had poems published in magazines before returning to live in Cheltenham. He has won prizes and appeared in magazines in England. He has won the Hippocrates Open Prize and been a Hawthornden Fellow. He has published five collections, four with Enitharmon Press and one with Five Seasons Press. He is married and has three daughters.

Lois Woestman writes because for her, words are truffles; when she finds the right one, her mouth waters. As a tango dancer, Lois writes because sometimes she feels she is dancing on the page. Lois writes because, at the heart, she was lucky to have had a mentor who modeled humble sharing of gifts, and who told her she was a writer and should do what she be. 

Richard Godden  is an Emeritus Professor of English (University of California, Irvine). His last critical work was Punctuating Capital: Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century (Oxford University Press, 2023). Long since, he published a poetry collection, Breathing Exercises (Peterloo Poets, 1986). “Hares” is one of a sequence of thirty haiku (“A Partial Genealogy for Condensed Milk”), part of a new manuscript (Agitated Air) that will soon seek publication. He writes slowly.

 

 

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Short-list of 37:

In alphabetical order (1105 entries in total)

POET	HAIKU TITLE
Alan Bleakley	Chough
Alan Bleakley	How the fish slipped away
Alan Bleakley	How the fisherman slipped away
Alan Bleakley	Child how you grow
Ayla Gard	Haiku for Nana Watanabe Shrimp Earrings
C.P. Nield	LIFE CYCLE
C.P. Nield	Stubbornly Attached
C.P. Nield	Seven Weeks
C.P. Nield	Seal Pod, Ostend
C.P. Nield	The Blue Rigi
C.P. Nield	The Flying Handbag
Caroline Clark	Day Case
Cathy Sampson	Regeneration
Cherry Elliott-Millar	Heart auscultation
Christian Morgner	Nature & Naming
Colette Hamilton	Bulimia
Cynthia Troup	[Haiku]
Dave Thomas	argument
David Hanson	A father’s hindsight
Emma Dandy	Pinprick scars
iain napier	Marvel
Joel Woodard	Atavistic Elegance
Kathleen Holliday	The Widowed Font
Linda Nemec Foster	Eliza Doolittle’s Ecodisaster
Lois Woestman	Offering
Lois Woestman	deja
Martin Childs	Fin de cinéma
Matt Minshall	Selfie
Michael Henry	Dead gull on the road
Nick Walsh	bare
Paul sutherland	windowpane
Richard Godden	Hares
Richard Godden	Ash
Sally Ashton	untitled
Sarah Boyd	Artificial
Seth Rhoades	Moonlight Intuition
Susan Richardson	Dawn / On the Road

 

 

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Long-list of 90:

In alphabetical order (1105 entries in total)

POET	HAIKU TITLE
Alan Bleakley	Chough
Alan Bleakley	How the fish slipped away
Alan Bleakley	How the fisherman slipped away
Alan Bleakley	Child how you grow
Alan Bleakley	Gull
Alan Bleakley	How the slipway slipped away
Andy Friedlander	MYSELF & I
Anne Middleton	Wordsworth Walks With Basho Grasmere exhibition Summer 2014 [1]
Ayla Gard	Haiku for Nana Watanabe Shrimp Earring
C.P. Nield	LIFE CYCLE
C.P. Nield	Stubbornly Attached
C.P. Nield	Seven Weeks
C.P. Nield	Seal Pod, Ostend
C.P. Nield	The Blue Rigi
C.P. Nield	The Flying Handbag
C.P. Nield	Grand Canal
Caroline Clark	Day Case
Cathy Sampson	Regeneration
Charlie Gere	After the Operation
Cherry Elliott-Millar	Heart auscultation
Christian Morgner	Nature & Naming
Christian Morgner	Mortality & Journey
Colette Hamilton	Bulimia
Cyd Hughes	Brother
Cynthia Troup	[Haiku]
Cynthia Troup	[Haiku]
Cynthia Troup	[Haiku]
Dave Thomas	argument
david austin	no title
David Hanson	A father’s hindsight
David Jones	Dorothy Wordsworth’s Winter
David Jones	Dorothy Wordsworth’s Autumn
Dawn Wisniewski	Reaper
Derek Dickinson	Fly Fishing
Eileen Marston	My Daily Sunshine
Emma Dandy	Pinprick scars
Emma Dandy	Mano fica
Gill Gregory	Trace
Heléne Van der Westhuizen	No title
iain napier	Marvel
iain napier	Punctuation
Jacqueline Thompson	Honesty
James Spencer	sad (acrosti-ku)
Jean Roarty	Vision
Jennifer Harrison	A thief
Joel Woodard	Atavistic Elegance
John Anderson	[awaiting pruning]
Joost van Gijzen	no title
Kathleen Holliday	The Widowed Font
Kirsty Seymour-Ure	Untitled (haiku 1)
Kirsty Seymour-Ure	Untitled (haiku 3)
Kyla Brown	I
Laura Halpin	Canvas
Linda Nemec Foster	Eliza Doolittle’s Ecodisaster
Lisa Rebert	husked
Lois Woestman	Offering
Lois Woestman	deja
Louis Talbot	Fine china
Louis Talbot	Carousel horse
Marc Corrigan	The world is changing.
Maria Joseph	Summer fly
Martin Childs	Fin de cinéma
Matt Minshall	Selfie
Michael Henry	Dead gull on the road
Michaela Brady	JFK, December 29th, 2025
Mike Greenhough	Sweeping cuts
Mitch Pruitt	War Games
Nichi Jackson	A Small Stain
Nick Walsh	bare
Oona Frawley	Untitled 1
Oona Frawley	Untitled 3
Paul sutherland	windowpane
Paul sutherland	for Mum
Paul sutherland	untitled
paula Oreilly	Country Lane
Raymond Sheehan	Canticles
Regina O’Melveny	After January 7
Richard Godden	Hares
Richard Godden	Ash
Richard Godden	Ring-Roads
Richard Harrow	ring cycle
Sally Ashton	untitled
Sarah Boyd	Artificial
Sarah Boyd	Drizzle
Seth Rhoades	Moonlight Intuition
SHARON HIER	Over Eryri
Susan Dines	Alfresco Kitchen
Susan Richardson	Dawn / On the Road
Tony Williams	an afternoon …
Zachary Mosher	Lemon Trees Ripen

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

From all of us at Fish, thank you for sharing your memoirs with us. The range, originality, and quality of the work made this year’s selection particularly interesting.

Well done to all writers who were short and long-listed, and a special congratulations to the ten winners whose stories will appear in the Fish Anthology 2026.

We’re delighted to invite you to the anthology launch at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, Co. Cork.
Venue: Marino Church
Date: 14 July
Time: 6.00 pm

This is a free event, and all are very welcome. We hope you can join us for what promises to be an enjoyable evening of readings and celebration.

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Winners

Here are the 10 winning Short Memoirs as chosen by Elspeth Beard to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2026. Notes on the stories from Elspeth, you will find below, plus more about the winning authors.

 

 

 

We thank Elspeth for her care and diligence in selecting the winners of the Memoir Prize.

 

1st Prize

Frogspawn by Stephanie O´Connor

This short story is a beautifully reflective meditation on childhood, memory and the quiet wonder of the natural world. It reminded me of growing up in London when I was given the freedom to roam and explore the world on my own – sadly something most children don’t experience any more. The narrator captures the innocence of solitary exploration and the profound fascination a child can feel from discovering the world on their own. From the beginning, there is a voice of calm authority and the description of memory as “silt settled after a flood” shows both the inevitability of recollection and the narrator’s gentle, patient relationship with the past. One of its main strengths is its setting and the contrast between the pastoral quiet of Ballyholme and the distant but persistent shadow of The Troubles.  

The recurring theme embodies wonder, secrecy, and reverence and becomes a powerful symbol of curiosity, and the fragile beginnings of life. I found the piece deeply moving in the way it contrasts the purity of childhood wonder with the moral complexity of adulthood, leaving the reader with a lingering sense of tenderness and thoughtful restraint toward the living world.  Frogspawn is a deeply felt piece that elevates a small, personal memory into a meditation on ethics, perception, and wonder. 

 

2nd Prize

A Sense of Belonging by Nuala O´Farrell

An engaging memoir that explores the challenges of professional identity, community trust, and perseverance. Through clear, conversational storytelling, the author recounts the intimidating experience of opening a single-handed general practice in Finglas in 1990. One of the most engaging aspects of the story is its depiction of the social and professional barriers the narrator faces as a young female doctor in a male-dominated profession. This is something I can relate to, having worked as an architect on building sites for the past thirty-five years! 

The early scenes, where she describes the quiet first day waiting for patients, create an immediate sense of vulnerability and determination. The story’s emotional core lies in the encounter with a particular patient and his brothers, which illustrates both the harsh realities of medical practice and the importance of trust between doctor and patient. The narrator’s calm authority and willingness to listen transform an aggressive encounter into a moment of understanding. The author grows in confidence and I found the conclusion of the story particularly satisfying. The description of the transformation from a lonely, uncertain beginning to a thriving medical practice provides a touching reflection on belonging and perseverance.

 

3rd Prize 

The Wide Arms of the Sea by Anil Classen

A moving and reflective story that explores love, identity, and family within the difficult context of Apartheid South Africa. The narrative is thoughtful and personal and told through the perspective of a son, who slowly uncovers the complicated love story between his parents. The story effectively shows how complicated love and family relationships can be, leaving the reader with a powerful sense of empathy and understanding.

 

Honorary Mentions (in no particular order)

Robin Yocum	Fires of the Valley
Kathryn Phelan	At a Funeral
Julian Bently-Edelman	Remains
Mary Holley	Flickers
Todd Diamond	Dark Tourism
Roger Vickery	The J Curve
Gordon Hayes	My father was the weather of our house

 

A Little About the Winners

 

Stephanie O’Connor writes fiction and nonfiction. She won the 2025 Hubert Butler Essay Prize, and her winning essay was published in The Irish Times. Her work has appeared in anthologies, and she is currently writing a book for the Haus Curiosities series, to be published by Haus Publishing. Originally from Bangor, Co. Down, she now lives in Wicklow.

 

Nuala O Farrell is a retired G.P. who has been writing all her life, but only attempted publication in the past few years. To her surprise and delight, her poetry has been published in The Galway Review, Causeway/ Cabhsair, The London Grip, The Samaritans Anthology, Drawn to the Light Press and others. She is presently completing a Masters in Creative Writing in U.C.D. This her first non-poetry publication and she is delighted to be joining the’ Fish’ creative writing community. 

 

Anil Classen is a German writer of Indian descent born and raised in South Africa, now based in Switzerland. With a background in Psychology and Journalism, he is a dedicated bookworm and former bookseller. Winner of the Writing District and Parracombe Prize, his work has appeared in The New York Times and various journals. 

 

Robin Yocum is known for his fiction set in his native Ohio Valley. His latest novel, The Last Hitman, was released in 2025. He has authored six additional novels. Favorite Sons was the USA Book News’ mystery/suspense book of the year. A Brilliant Death was a Barnes & Noble No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The Sacrifice of Lester Yates was a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Award.

 

Kathryn Phelan is a copywriter and editor in Dublin. Her writing has previously appeared in The New York Times, The Irish Times, The Telegraph, The Fish Anthology, The Best American Sports Writing, The Sun literary magazine, and The Masters Review, among others. She is writing a book but slowly. 

 

Julian Bentley-Edelman lives in Bellingham, Washington. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing and an MSW from the University of Washington, and has worked as both a classroom teacher and elder-care social worker. When she isn’t writing, she runs long distances or hikes in the Cascades with her husband. Her work has appeared in Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, and is forthcoming in Persimmon Tree and BoomerLit Mag.

 

Mary Holley´s writing delves into the ordinary bringing life to the everyday, and sometimes the less everyday, adventures. She believes everyone has an original story to tell and likes to write about emotions, past experiences and what makes people tick. Flickers is part of a memoir collection highlighting, in chronological  order, significant milestones in a life filled with family. She hopes to complete the collection next year and would consider her work creative non-fiction.

 

Todd Diamond delivers narratives that are unapologetically raw and darkly humorous. Whether it’s sordid tales from his advertising career or stories about his family’s Holocaust experiences, he resonates with those who prefer their prose served with a healthy dose of cynicism and unsweetened insight. His work has earned industry recognition and occasional controversy for its irreverent edge.

 

Roger Vickery is descended from John Vickery who was shipwrecked in Bantry Bay in the 1740’s. An omen? This memoir recounts Roger’s jinxed contribution to a voyage in a 1930 America’s Cup Challenger. If ambulances, suppositories, coups, toppling masts and sea poetry take your fancy, this is for you. Roger has won many Australian and international writing awards, including the Fish Poetry and Short Story sections. This photo was taken after a swim in Bantry. With Roger’s sailing skills, water confidence is essential.

 

Gordon Hayes: We have been unable to contact Gordon Hayes. As far as we can determine he lives in England. If anybody out there knows him, please let him know that his short memoir My father was the weather of our house has been selected for the Fish Anthology 2026, and ask him to contact Fish Publishing.

 

 

 

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Short-list: (26)

alphabetical order by author first name

Anil Classen	The Wide Arms of the Sea
Candy Neubert	on bad terms
Catherine Deegan	Lucky
Charlotte Sturgess	The Ties that Bind
Charlotte Sturgess	The Ties that Bind
Daisy O´Clee	No Turning Back
Gordon Hayes	My father was the weather of our house
Helena Guerin	Show Your Work
Hooman Qavidel	That Morning
Julian Barrett	The Rat Place
Julian Bentley-Edelman	Remains
Kate Behrens	Funny Blood
Kathryn Phelan	Small Planes
Kathryn Phelan	At a Funeral
Mary Holley	Flickers
Nicholas Warner	To the Cabaret Palermo
Nuala O Farrell	A Sense of Belonging
Robert Maxwell	Barbie Doll
Robert Maxwell	Athalee
Robert Maxwell	Legs
Robin Yocum	Fires of the Valley
Robin Yocum	Fires of the Valley
Roger Vickery	The J Curve
Stephanie O’Connor	Frogspawn
Todd Diamond	Dark Tourism
Tom fox	Zulu

Put in table 

 

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Long-list: (61)

In alphabetical order by author first name

Anil Classen	The Wide Arms of the Sea
Anne Osbourn	The secret diary of an aspirin…
Anthony Dew	More Than Skin
Barry McKinley	Can A Country Betray You?
Ben Dillon	Greyhound From Vegas
Candy Neubert	on bad terms
Catherine Deegan	Lucky
Charles Kitching	Draped in Peace
Charlotte Sturgess	The Ties that Bind
Christina Ruotolo	Night Game
Daisy O´Clee	No Turning Back
David Sosnowski	Lessons Learned
Doreena Jennings	Lucky Girl
Edward Moran	the SEMI-TERRES
Elizabeth J Jones	Baptism of Fire
Gill Edwards	The Truth
Gill Edwards	Snapshots
Gordon Hayes	My father was the weather of our house
Helena Guerin	Show Your Work
Hooman Qavidel	That Morning
Ian McDonald	Nanny Mac’s Front Room
Jane Cottingham	Aortic dissection
Janin Khaleel	Sharp Things
Joanna Goddard	The Holdall
JoAnne Tillemans	Too Young to Go
Joseph William Vass	Mobuto / A Bonbon Perhaps
Julian Barrett	The Rat Place
Julian Bentley-Edelman	Remains
Kate Behrens	Funny Blood
Kathryn Phelan	Small Planes
Kathryn Phelan	At a Funeral
Kenneth Malich	The Bay Ate My Brother (Almost…
Kevin Kearney	The Bypass and the Boy
Liam Moore	I Used to Think Jeans Were Mad…
Lynn Bushell	Afterlife
Martin Sorrell	Night Train to Toulouse
Mary Dixon	London 1970
Mary Gorman	HIJACKED
Mary Holley	Flickers
Michel Petheram	Welcome to London
Mike Murray	Four Children – Laura
Nicholas Warner	To the Cabaret Palermo
Nuala O Farrell	A Sense of Belonging
Rachel Cann	Memoir of a Star
Rachel Pinckheard	To my wish baby
Richard Jordan-Baker	The lap dancer, the false teet…
Robert Maxwell	Barbie Doll
Robert Maxwell	Athalee
Robert Maxwell	Legs
Robin Yocum	Fires of the Valley
Roger Vickery	The J Curve
Simone Miller	Love Triangles
Sonya Keogh	She
Stephanie O’Connor	Frogspawn
Stephen Dexter jr	Chomeur
susan gress	Vashon Velvet, for the pursuit…
Todd Diamond	Dark Tourism
Tom fox	Memoir Zulu
Tony Elston	TMI or The C Words
Vivian Heller	The Moth
Zell Ping	Max

 

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

From all of us at Fish, thank you for sharing your flash stories with us. The range, originality, and quality of the work made this year’s selection especially rewarding.

Congratulations to all writers who were shortlisted and longlisted—and a special well done to the ten winners whose stories will appear in the Fish Anthology 2026.

We’re delighted to invite you to the anthology launch at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry.
Venue: Marino Church
Date: 14 July
Time: 6.00 pm

This is a free event, and all are very welcome. We hope you can join us for what promises to be an enjoyable evening of readings and celebration.

---

 

Winners

Here are the 10 winning Flash Fiction Stories, as chosen by Tania Hershman, to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2026. Notes on the stories from Tania, you will find below, plus more about the authors.

 

 

 

 

AUTHOR	TITLE
First Prize: Lourdes Mackey	Impasto
Second Prize: Jess Richards	Within The Rain (drop) Community
Third Prize: Jack Morris	More than half your body is not human, say scientists
HONORARY MENTIONS (no particular order)
Gerard Byrne	The Algorithm Under the Hill
Catherine Ogston	A Series of Decisions You Must Make When Your Hall Light Fitting Needs Replaced
Léonie Gregson	Sea Reckoning
Jacques Denault	Meeting the Devil
Alison Woodhouse	Freshly Afraid
Jeannie Mackenzie	Sometimes, folding is the wisest course of action
Gráinne Patterson	Animal

 

BIOS 

Powered by tea and Tayto crisps, Lourdes Mackey mostly writes historical fiction. While researching her stories she regularly needs rescuing from deep rabbit holes, but when completed the stories appear in newspapers, – The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner, in literary magazines – Crannóg and Flashback Fiction and in anthologies – the UEA’s Suffragette Stories, From the Well, and Sunday Miscellany. She lives in an old house on top of a hill in Cork City with too many books and not enough shelves.

Jess Richards is the author of Costa shortlisted Snake Ropes, Cooking with Bones, City of Circles (Sceptre) and Birds and Ghosts (Linen Press). Jess lives with her wife, author Sally J Morgan, in West Yorkshire. She is currently working towards a collection of short fiction, titled Threads and Distortions, which will be published by Linen Press. While she is not writing or dreaming, Jess works as a Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Leeds.

Jack Morris lives in Brighton, UK. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the Open University. She is editor of Neither Fish Nor Foul, a flash fiction magazine. She’s fond of the gym, improv, and drama (on stage. Mostly) and her online published work can be found at https://thewavingnotdrowningblog.com/

Gerard Byrne is a senior technical trainer with a gift for making complex ideas feel clear and human, lives in Belfast. After authoring seven programming books, he took a deliberate turn toward creative writing and the deeper possibilities of language. What began as a storytelling class became a new direction: one where precision meets pleasure,  where the joy lies in shaping words that leave space for meaning to emerge, allowing each reader to find something uniquely their own.

Catherine Ogston loves writing tiny stories, with flash fiction work published in Best Microfiction 2025, Bath Flash, Flash 500, National Flash Fiction Day anthologies and others. Catherine has also published short stories and had novel-length work shortlisted for awards such as the Kelpies and Exeter Novel Prize. After completing an MLitt in Creative Writing, she is delighted to champion prose writing as the 2026 Scriever for the Federation of Writers (Scotland).            

Léonie Gregson is a Tasmanian-born writer based in Gloucestershire. A lover of wild coastlines and remote mountains, her fiction is shaped by landscape, memory and the natural world. In 2024 she won the People’s Friend Bursary for unpublished writers, judged by a panel including Adam Kay, Adele Parks and Louise Welsh. She has also worked on writing projects around men’s mental health, including coordinating a 2021 anthology with a foreword by Monty Don.

Jacques Denault’s work has appeared in Hobart, Fourteen Hills, Litro USA, and Writer’s Digest. He is an editor for Writer’s Digest’s 2nd Draft editorial service and has taught everything from horror cinema to literature and creative writing at Endicott College and Clark University. Beyond writing and the classroom, Jacques is a historian and actor, with a brief stint in archaeology.

Alison Woodhouse is a writer and teacher living in the south west of England. Her flash collection, Family Frames, was published in 2021 (V Press) and her novella-in-flash The House on the Corner (AdHoc Fiction) in 2020. She is widely published both online and in print, most recently winning Mslexia Flash Prize, 2025. She’s just returned from 3 months living in Austin, Texas (where this story is set) on a UKRI fellowship researching the writing processes of contemporary author. 

The salt tang of a Hebridean childhood permeates Jeannie’s MacKenzie’s creative non-fiction, novels, short stories and poetry. Published in academia, literary magazines and anthologies, her writing ebbs and flows with the tides of her life as a full-time carer. She teaches creative writing in a community setting and has just completed her second novel – a coming of age novel about a selectively mute single mother surviving the Clydebank blitz of 1941.

Gráinne Patterson is from the roaring west Atlantic coast of Donegal and now lives by the Pacific ocean in New Zealand, where she has completed an MA in Creative Nonfiction, written a memoir, and published several essays. Her writing specialises in trauma, healing, and the rippling dynamics that are created in not-so-functional families. This is her first foray into flash fiction writing, and she found it much harder (albeit shorter) than writing a whole book.

 

 

Judge’s Comments – Tania Hershman, April 2026

It’s a fascinating process reading 800+ entries to a writing competition! I’ve done it once before, for a short story contest, but not for flash fiction. Judging is always a subjective act – another judge may well have made entirely different choices – and it was a privilege to be allowed to choose the stories that spoke to me from all of those that their writers had the courage to submit to be judged. It is truly an act of courage to send your work out into the world, and I applaud the hundreds of writers that did that, it’s no small thing.

As a competition judge, my job is to find reasons not to add stories to the Maybe or Yes piles, otherwise my task would be impossible. What I was looking for isn’t easily defined; as is clear in the FUEL anthology of prizewinning flash fictions I edited (www.fuelflash.net) there really is no formula for a winning story. I don’t believe there is anything that a flash story “should” be, that because you “only” have 300 words there is something you can’t do, such as have many characters, more than one scene, description and backstory, movement in time. Here, I was looking for a piece that works not despite but because of the tight word limit, that uses the brevity rather than straining against it. Something I noticed as I read all the entries was that there were many stories that ended just as they were, in fact, getting going. Something interesting had just happened – and then they stopped. I suspect it was to do with this competition’s particular word limit, but this means they were not complete pieces of flash fiction, and this was one common reason a story didn’t reach the longlist. I do encourage the writers of these stories to take a second look and think about whether they might want to carry on writing, because there are quite a few potentially wonderful longer stories here!

Moving on to my choices, the flash story I awarded first prize to, ‘Impasto’, is for me the perfect embodiment of what flash fiction can do, both in the story it is telling and the way the writer is telling it. I read it numerous times and it had that magical quality of affecting me each time, and revealing something new. The “plot” is not a novel one, an unhappy relationship, but the way this writers approaches it has that freshness that I was looking for. A whole life is here, so much in the spaces between the words as in the words themselves. It begins as if we already know these characters, told in close-third person (“she”) so that I can hear the main character. The piece is structured in three long sentences, with pacing that beautifully conveys the main character’s state of mind, and the writer has selected their language so carefully that a few well-chosen words conjure an entire world. I always worry that a story that begins strongly will not sustain that until the end, because the ending of a short story – and all the more so a short short story – is vital. I need not have worried. The ending is perfect, that beautiful combination of endingness yet leaving enough lingering to stay with us long after we have finished reading. Bravo!

My second prize flash story, ‘Within the Rain (drop) Community’, is very different in style and voice, told in the first-person-plural (“we”) from the point of view of a group of characters, and non-human characters at that! This has such an exciting newness to it, it has humour and playfulness both in its words and in its structure on the page, using brackets to great effect. And, as the greatest short pieces do, it manages in 300 words to tackle something so much wider and larger than it first appears, to make a comment on our own societies and the way we live. An exciting, moving and unforgettable piece.

My third prize choice, ‘Over half your body is not human, say scientists’, delighted me immediately with its mention of scientists in the title and the first line. Using science as inspiration for creative pieces is something very dear to my heart, and as I read on, I was crossing my fingers that this story would live up to its promise. It very much did. Different again from the other two flash stories in the top three, it is told in second person, addressing “you” directly, and this choice of point of view works perfectly with the idea of a person being an experimental subject. I won’t give anything away, but oh my I did not see that ending coming, and it is a fabulous example of a commonly-held idea that endings should be both surprising and then, when you look back, also somehow entirely fitting. A wonderful flash story.

The eight flash stories I chose to award Honorable Mentions to are also extremely diverse in plot, language, structure and style, from realism to the magical, poignancy, comedy, and everything in between, in some cases spanning a few minutes and, in others, years. We have myth meeting AI, a story told in the form of multiple choice questions, a tale of seas and shipwreck, and the devil as we have never encountered him, alongside the troll living in the park, the rebel pastor’s daughter, and novel takes on both moon landing conspiracy theories and campus student-professor issues.

The competition was judged anonymously, of course, and when I do find out their names, I look forward to seeing what all these eleven writers do next, I will be keeping my eye on them. Congratulations to them and to the entire shortlist and longlist, please known that rising up out of 800+ entries is a great achievement. And thank you to everyone who entered for being brave enough to send your words out into the world. Don’t stop!

 

 

 

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Short-list:

(36  flash stories)

Jeannie Mackenzie	SOMETIMES, FOLDING IS THE WISEST COURSE OF ACTION
Jess Richards	Associate Volunteer
Jack Morris	Over half your body is not human, say scientists
Jess Richards	within the rain (drop) community
Gillian Isaacs Russell	Snow-White and Rose-Red
Jeffrey-Michael Kane	Things My Brother Explains With Absolute Authority
Kristin Walrod	But This Time Will Be Different
C M Meera	THE LAST MISSED CALL
Angela Fitzpatrick	Butterflies on the Mirror
Elena Gao Garcia	That Word You Should Never Utter and if You do it Must be With Utmost Caution
Elena Gao Garcia	Rule Number One: Chess Is a Two Coloured Game
Norbert Gleißner	The Final Prompt
Alison Woodhouse	Freshly Afraid
Aline Soules	Swimming Lesson
Jacques Denault	Meeting the Devil
Jacques Denault	American Adjunct
Hannah Morphet	Mater Morphosis
Richard Law	The Mini-Minotaur
Sue Lewis	Song of Icarus
Martha Swift	The Menagerie
Leonie Gregson	Sea Reckoning
Marie Altzinger	In the Concubines’ Courtyard
Grainne Patterson	Animal
Amanda O’Callaghan	Telling The Bees
Gerard Byrne	The Algorithm Under the Hill
Marc Minnaar	Archive
Chris Cottom	Next They Ruled That Only Men Could Wear Buttons
Lourdes Mackey	Impasto
Frances Gapper	Emily and Emily, Living in a Cave
Trina O Hare	Butchered
Emily Ryan	Divine Bodies
Sofia Salazar	Inheritance
Shelley Roche-Jacques	If an avalanche, that winter
Catherine Ogston	A Series of Decisions You Must Make When Your Hall Light Fitting Needs Replaced
Cate Sapiano Chin	Rush
Cate Sapiano Chin	Clean Sheets

 

 

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Long-list:

In alphabetical order (76)

Abigail Williams	The Moths Have Been At Our Love
Aline Soules	Swimming Lesson
Alison Langley	In tatters
Alison Woodhouse	Freshly Afraid
Amanda O’Callaghan	Telling The Bees
Angela Fitzpatrick	Butterflies on the Mirror
Beatrice Motamedi	Brown Girl in Bardo
Brandy Reinke	What He Thinks When He Feels Her Near
Brennan McElhone	Abbeville
Brianna O Sullivan	All Roads Lead To This
C M Meera	THE LAST MISSED CALL
Caroline Jenner	Broken Dreams
Cate Sapiano Chin	Rush
Cate Sapiano Chin	Clean Sheets
Catherine Ogston	A Series of Decisions You Must Make When Your Hall Light Fitting Needs Replaced
Charles Hadfield	CLEAN SWEEP
Charlie Pulling	A Fool’s Passage
Chris Cottom	Next They Ruled That Only Men Could Wear Buttons
cory brown	Coruscation
Dana Baylous	Inventory of What Was Left
David Lee	Stargazer
Eleanor Holmes	Silly Goose
Elena Gao Garcia	That Word You Should Never Utter and if You do it Must be with Utmost Caution
Elena Gao Garcia	Rule Number One: Chess Is a Two Coloured Game
Emily Rinkema	Stayin’ Alive
Emily Ryan	Divine Bodies
Emma Robdale	Goldilocks Untamed
Frances Gapper	Emily and Emily, Living in a Cave
Gerard Byrne	The Algorithm Under the Hill
Gillian Isaacs Russell	Snow-White and Rose-Red
Grainne Patterson	Animal
Hannah Morphet	Mater Morphosis
Henry Tomb	The New Fresh Hell
Jack Morris	Over half your body is not human, say scientists
Jacques Denault	Meeting the Devil
Jacques Denault	American Adjunct
James Allan Kennedy	The Passenger Seat
Jean O’Brien	Betamax
Jeannie Mackenzie	SOMETIMES, FOLDING IS THE WISEST COURSE OF ACTION
Jeffrey-Michael Kane	Things My Brother Explains With Absolute Authority
Jess Richards	Associate Volunteer
Jess Richards	within the rain (drop) community
Jess Richards	The Radio Man Says ‘Discomfort’
John Hillman	Scones
K Wise	Catch
Kate Durrant	Dog years
Kate Twitchin	Let Them Eat Crap
Keefe Deighan	Christmas 2018
Kelly Hopson	Element
Kristin Walrod	But This Time Will Be Different
Laura Carroll	Lovely Little Things
Leonie Gregson	Sea Reckoning
Lourdes Mackey	Impasto
Lucienne Cummings	Waxing
Máire T Robinson	The Paper Menagerie
Marc Minnaar	Archive
Marie Altzinger	In the Concubines’ Courtyard
Martha Swift	The Menagerie
Maxime Kawawa-Beaudan	Thunder
Mayra David	Where Space and Time Could Be the Same Thing
Mikko Järvenpää	The Creation Myth as Told by Blue Whales
Niall James Holohan	In Memoriam: Ozzie Osbert (1937 – 2026)
Norbert Gleißner	The Final Prompt
Peter Mills	Bathroom Entropy
Peter Mills	Suzy and the Ger-gnome
Richard Law	The Mini-Minotaur
Rosaleen Lynch	Catch and Release
Sally Brisley	Biog: Early Poetic Influences
Seán McNicholl	Everyone Knows
Shelley Roche-Jacques	If an avalanche, that winter
Sofia Salazar	Inheritance
Sophie Swatman	Flotsam
Sue Lewis	Song of Icarus
Timothy Collyer	Low Tide at Rhossili
Trina O Hare	Butchered
Wendy Osborne	Amanita Phalloides

 

 

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

On behalf of all of us at Fish, congratulations to those who made the short and long lists. 

Special congratulations to the ten winning writers, whose stories will be published in the Fish Anthology 2026.

Sincere thanks to Sean Lusk for his time and wisdom in selecting the winners.

See Sean’s comments on the winning stories below.

 

The launch of the Fish Anthology 2026 will take place during the West Cork Literary Festival, Bantry, Ireland.

Festival dates are 11 – 18 July, the launch date to be confirmed.
Venue: Marino Church. The launch is a free event and all are welcome.

(There were 856 entries to the competition.)

 

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First Prize:

Nothing Becomes a Man Like His Fall by Bar Reddin

A dazzling imagining of the hours before Oscar Wilde’s arrest. The language and imagery here is simply outstanding. We see Wilde’s collapsing world through his eyes (though the narrative is skilfully told in close third person). The pace is gripping, the emotion poignant and convincing. A tour-de-force.     – Sean Lusk

 

Second Prize:

Visitation Rights  by Cindy Dale

A beautifully told story of a visit by a ghost forewarning an old lover of the impending events of 9/11. We are given just enough backstory to care about the narrator and understand her dilemma in whether to forewarn the ghost’s brother of what is to befall him. Touching and original.    – Sean Lusk

 

Third Prize:

Revenants by Emily Bullock

This tender story of a prodigal son returning to take possession of an old cottage which his father is repairing is filled with tension and unspoken loss and longing. It’s beautifully structured and told with poise and confidence.    – Sean Lusk

 

Honorary Mentions (in no particular order):

 

Cycle of Fireflies by Jillian Grant Shoichet

A story filled with heartbreak and tragedy, this is a meditation on the fragility of life. Moving backwards and forwards in time seamlessly and playing deftly with the analogy of the life of the firefly, the author leaves the reader much to ponder.    – Sean Lusk

 

The God of Lost Things by Gauri Davies

An absorbing story of a woman’s return to India to seek justice for a servant who she’d witnessed being terribly mistreated by her ex-husband’s family many years before. Characters are impressively drawn with the lightest of touches, and much as we hope for a happy ending, part of us knows the truth is likely to disappoint.    – Sean Lusk

 

The Music Room  by Judith Wilson

A trombone player about to perform in a concert, muses on her family relationships. The author keeps us in the concert hall throughout, while we are carried convincingly into the narrator’s past, alternating from the tension of the performance to the pain of difficult memories.    – Sean Lusk

 

Breathing Space by Sally Bramley

In this story it is a tuba, owned by the narrator’s deceased father, that carries memories of family and the tension of estrangement from a sister. Engagingly told and perfectly judged.    – Sean Lusk

 

The Deer by Peter Rose

A worker on a country estate grapples with his boss, a police search for a missing boy, a difficult neighbour and his relationship with his daughter, punctuated by fleeting sighting of a herd of mysterious deer. A story rich with incident and intrigue.    – Sean Lusk

 

Old Growth by Alexander Weinstein

A strikingly original tale of an elderly couple living in the branches of an old sequoia as the world they have turned their backs on becomes ever more impersonal, technologically dependent and alienating. Finely told and beautifully imagined.    – Sean Lusk

 

The Missing  by Megan Baxter

A woman disappears from her old people’s home, and the narrator, with his dog, is a member of the search party. We experience the narrator’s frustrations with a search that is poorly organised and feel we’re in safe hands, authorially and in terms of character, as the search progresses.    – Sean Lusk

 

A LITTLE ABOUT THE WINNERS:

 

Bar Reddin is a Portlaoise-born writer and artist with a distinguished background in the literary and fine arts. His poetry has been recognized in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition and published in Swerve Magazine. He was a runner-up in the Love On the Road Topophilia Writing Contest and a finalist for the Liberties Press Short Story Compendium. Also an acclaimed artist, Bar received the Ireland-Newfoundland Partnership Award and was a Derwent International Art Prize finalist.

Cindy Dale’s short stories have appeared in various literary journals and websites.  Four of her stories have also been included in anthologies.  She is a past recipient of a fellowship from The Edward Albee Foundation.  Cindy and her husband live on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island with their two cats and also enjoy occasional visits from their two adult children. One day she hopes to complete a novel.

Emily Bullock won the Bristol Short Story Prize with her story ‘My Girl’, which was also broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her debut novel, The Longest Fight, was shortlisted for the Cross Sports Book Awards. Her second novel Inside the Beautiful Inside was published in 2020, and her collection of short stories, Human Terrain, was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2022. Almost a Ghost Story, her third novel, will be published in 2026.

Jillian Grant Shoichet started writing fiction as an antidote to a happy childhood in pastoral British Columbia. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Fish Short Memoir Prize. In 2025, she won the Exeter Writers Short Story Competition. Jillian holds a doctorate in literacy and oral tradition and is the policy analyst in the BC legislation office. She lives on Vancouver Island with her two children.

Gauri Davies is an Australian writer based in London, of Indian heritage. Her fiction explores the friction and tenderness between Indian and Western cultures, tracing how identity is shaped in the space between them. She writes about migration, family expectation, ambition, and the quiet negotiations required to belong in more than one world at once.

Judith Wilson is a London-based writer and journalist. She won the du Maurier Fowey Literary Festival Short Story competition 2025, and the London Short Story Prize 2019, and she has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, awarded with Distinction. Judith is married, with two grown-up children, and she loves nothing better than to retreat to the wild Cornish coastline and walk by the sea. She is currently working on a novel.

Sally Bramley was born in the north of England on a farm, but currently lives in Bristol. She won the Caledonian Novel Award for her novel Structural Damage set on the east coast of Yorkshire where the land is falling into the sea at an alarming rate. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies. When not writing, she tramps for miles along the UK’s coastal footpaths, as it gives her time to think.

Although Peter Rose wrote avidly as a boy, his ambitions of being an author were thwarted by careers in, amongst other things, t-shirt printing and web design. He only returned to creative writing seriously after retirement. He lives on the edge of Epping Forest and much of his output reflects his concerns about the vanishing natural world. He is currently working on a cli-fi novel and a collection of stories set in small-town New Mexico.

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the collections Universal Love & Children of the New World, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His fiction has appeared in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Best American Experimental Writing. The adaptation of his story After Yang by A24 was the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance, the Boston Society of Film Critics Award, and Barack Obama’s Best Films of 2022.

Megan Baxter lives in New Hampshire, USA, where she runs her own small farm growing vegetables, cut flowers, and berries. She teaches creative writing through online courses and lessons. Her essay collection, Twenty Square Feet of Skin, was longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She has published three books of creative nonfiction and is currently writing short stories and novels. 

 

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SHORT-LIST

(alphabetical order) There are 41 stories on the short-list. 

 

AUTHOR	TITLE
Adam Brannigan	The good meat must be upon the table
Alexander Weinstein	Old Growth
Amanda Hildebrandt	Flower Children
Anya Achtenberg	Enki and the Smart Bomb
Bappa Chakraborty	Water on Taro Leaf
Bar Reddin	Nothing Becomes a Man Like His Fall
Christopher Steely	I Need To Tell You Something
David Gillette	Rank Strangers
Don Warne	Vivus
Emily Bullock	Sunshine
Erica Sharlette	Pulling the Wings off Butterflies
Felix Peeters	Just in Case
Gareth Jones	The Mouse
Gary Quinn	Masters of the Universe
Gauri Davies	The God of Lost Things
Geraldine Ryan	In the gap between her brother and mine
Hal Ackerman	Boychik
Helen Fortescue-Poole	Goat Story
James Putnam	Hive Song
Jo Stein	Go Fly a Kite
Jo Stein	The Big Lie
Judith Wilson	The Music Room
Justin Cooke	The Edge
Keith Johnson	The Foxes
Kieran Costello	Apricity
Kirsten Johnson	Lanetta Paul, 2003
Laura Besley	once up a
Laurence Lumsden	MetaFamily Matters
Leonie Gregson	A Record of Absence
Maria Jackson	Encode, store, retrieve
Marion Llewellyn	A small duty for a tall order
Mary Swan	What Happened Next
MEGAN Baxter	The Missing
Michael Packman	Self-Portrait
Robert Doggett	Gulf Story
Robert Maxwell	Barbie Doll
Sally Bramley	Visiting Frankie
Simon Miles	The Edge
Susannah Lash	The Return

 

 

 

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Long-list:

(alphabetical order)

There are  87 stories in the long-list. 

AUTHOR	TITLE
Adam Brannigan	The good meat must be upon the table
AF Packer	Their Finest Half Hour
Alexander Weinstein	Old Growth
Amanda Hildebrandt	Flower Children
Andrew Cooper	A State of Surveillance
Andrew Steiner	Colossus
Anton Fried	The Death of a Rabbit
Anya Achtenberg	Enki and the Smart Bomb
Bappa Chakraborty	Water on Taro Leaf
Bar Reddin	Nothing Becomes a Man Like His Fall
Billy Fenton	The Black Rock
Brían French	Mrs YKK
Brían French	Oceans of Notions
Cathy Hume	Firing
Charles Kitching	A Measure of Life
Chris Williams	Healthy Transitional Objects
Christine Powell	Ghost Light
Christopher Steely	I Need To Tell You Something
Chrystal Newman	Always There, After All
Ciara Aaron	Parnell Square
Cindy Dale	Visitation Rights
Davey Freedman	The Last Hunter-Gatherer in Natwich
David Gilette	Rank Strangers
David Micklem	Starting Fires
Don Warne	Vivus
Edward Hubbard	Alberto’s Inferno
Emily Bullock	Sunshine
Emily Bullock	Revenants
Enda Wyley	The Wishbone
Erica Sharlette	Pulling the Wings off Butterflies
Ewart Hutton	Moira´s Legacy
Felix Peeters	Just in Case
Gareth Jones	The Mouse
Gary Quinn	Masters of the Universe
Gauri Davies	The God of Lost Things
Geraldine Ryan	In the gap between her brother and mine
Hal Ackerman	Boychik
Hannah Webb	Bottom’s Dream
Helen Fortescue-Poole	Goat Story
Huseyn Mehrzad	Tree, Tree and the Tree
Ian Plenderleith	A Fascist in the Family
Isaac Zhang	Recall
Jonathan Vidgop	The Honorary Citizen
Jaime Gill	Obedience
James Putnam	Hive Song
James Skivington	TWINS
Jane Dugdale	Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps
Jillian Grant Shoichet	Cycle of Fireflies
Jo Stein	The Big Lie
Jo Stein	Go Fly a Kite
Judith Wilson	The Music Room
Justin Cooke	The Edge
Keith Gayhart	Bernie and Bunny
Keith Johnson	The Foxes
Kieran Costello	Apricity
Kirsten Johnson	Lanetta Paul, 2003
Laura Besley	once up a
Laurence Lumsden	MetaFamily Matters
Leonie Gregson	A Record of Absence
Lizzie Nunnery	Paul McCartney is not dead
Malcolm Hayhoe	Cornish and the Wafer
Margi Hatjoullis	The Interim is Mine
Maria Jackson	Encode, store, retrieve
Maria Rondon-Hanway	I Always Knew
Marion Llewellyn	A small duty for a tall order
Mary Swan	What Happened Next
MEGAN Baxter	The Missing
Michael Packman	Self-Portrait
Owen O’Reilly	Non Sequitur
Patricia Beesley	Genograms
Peter Rose	The Deer
Rebecca Graham	Laure
Robert Doggett	Gulf Story
Robert Maxwell	Barbie Doll
Sally Bramley	Breathing space
Sally Bramley	The Bottom Field
Sally Bramley	Mary Poppins on the coast path
Sally Bramley	Visiting Frankie
Sarah Cotton	The Other Side
Seán McNicholl	Walk in the Park
Selayna Svejkovsky	Tend the Hearth
Simon Miles	The Edge
Sophie Burkham	O Superwoman
Stephen Alexander	Awakening Alice
Susannah Lash	The Return
Susannah Lash	Penelope Unmasked

 

This launch was wonderful. My personal favorite. The charming Marino Church in Bantry had the smell of fresh paint and new comfy seats, occupied by literary lovers, enjoying the festival, or locals who regularly attend the Fish launches.

I will post photos here soon of the event. We had 12 of the authors there  to read from their work. Less than others years, but the extra time each author had allowed for an explanation of there work, it’s inspiration or about their writing career. That was interesting. Everyone read brilliantly. It’s such a privilege to hear the authors read their work, it sets a tone that not always comes across when reading it, and listening to each one truly brought their work alive. The book tasted good, and it highlighted the quality of work in the Anthology. As Clem said at the closing of the launch, ‘This book is hard to get into, and the readers here today demonstrated the level of talent needed to do so’.

Thanks to the writers who made it and to the appreciative audience.

(Jula Walton of the Fish team)

 

LAUNCHED:

Wednesday 16th July at 6:30
Marino (Old Methodist) Church,
Bantry, West Cork, Ireland

This Anthology contains the winning short stories, flash fiction, memoirs and poem.

Judges, Sean Lusk, Tania Hershman, Ted Simon and Billy Collins selected the work for this anthology from the submissions to the Fish Writing Prizes.

The launch of the Fish Anthology – an annual buffet of new talent that is now in its 30th year –  was the inspiration for, and the start of, The West Cork Literary Festival and the launch of the Anthology remains a central event there.

 

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

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Here are the winners of the Fish Poetry Prize 2025, selected by Billy Collins, to be published in the Fish Anthology 2025.

Below you will find short biographies of the winners and the Long and Short Lists.

From all of us at Fish we congratulate the poets whose poems made it here. There were 1,886 entries and competition was very tough.

The Fish Anthology will  be launched as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, (Marino Church, Bantry, West Cork Wednesday 16th July – 18.30.) All are welcome!

 

 

FIRST PRIZE:

The Harvesters by Michael Lavers  (Read Winning Poem)

Another of Michael Lavers’s poem, On Cabbages, is an honorary mention. 

 

 

SECOND PRIZE:

Prayer at the Cove by Wes Lee

 

 

THIRD PRIZE:

A zuihitsu on how everything is about my estranged father by Sue Burge

 

 

 

HONORARY MENTIONS (In no particular order): 

 

On Meeting Shakespeare in the Supermarket  by Kate Bailey

 

 

Aubade to my Phlebotomist  by Partridge Boswel

 

 

Blitzkrieg in the Library by Seamus Scanlon

 

 

Whatever else by Jane Williams

 

 

The Fisherboy´s Knots by Paris Rosemont

 

 

Kells Turning by Elaine O’Connor

 

 

 

 

BIOGRAPHIES

Michael Lavers is the author of two poetry collections, After Earth and The Inextinguishable, both published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Southwest Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, the Moth Poetry Prize, and theBridport Poetry Prize. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.

Wes Lee has three poetry collections. Most recently she was  awarded the Magma Editors’ Prize 2024/05; the 2024 Free Verse Prize, by The Poetry Society, in London; the Heroines/Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize 2022, in New South Wales, and placed in The Plaza Poetry Prize 2025. Her short story ‘How They Live Now’ was the subject of The Stinging Fly Podcast for September 2022, originally selected by Sally Rooney and read by Susannah Dickey, in Dublin.

Sue Burge is a freelance writer, mentor and editor based in North Norfolk, UK. She is also a film-studies tutor with a penchant for silent film, road movies and David Lynch. Her most recent poetry collection, The Artificial Parisienne (Live Canon 2024 ), explores the alter ego she left behind in Paris three decades ago and her edgy on-going relationship with the city. Her eco-angst collection, watch it slowly fade, is forthcoming with Yaffle Press.

Kate Bailey is a violinist and musician who has always enjoyed writing, photography and languages on the side. Her house is rather like a jumble sale, and her garden like a jungle, and she suspects that these analogies extend to the contents of her brain. One of her biggest joys (other than music, eating and her family and friends) is listening to a blackbird singing. She is married with two grown-up daughters and lives in Oxford.

Partridge Boswell is the author of the 2024 Fool for Poetry Prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House and Grolier Poetry Prize-winning collection Some Far Country. He is co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival and teaches at Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal. He troubadours widely with the bard band Los Lorcas—touring Ireland and West Cork’s inhabited islands in support of their new album Wild Island in June 2025.

Seamus Scanlon loves Fish so but not so, fish. Because a vegan. He explores the ambiguity of the Irish towards violence and pressing social issues like skorts in camogie.Recent fiction outings include Walking the Thin Line (Promethean); I Follow (2024 Fish Anthology). Recent drama outings include The McGowan Trilogy, Thomastown (May 2025). Recent gym outings, zero. Recent failings, greater than zero. Recent and recurrent longing, Organico (Bantry). Work in progress – The Skorts Trilogy (Play). www.seamusscanlon.com

Jane Williams was born in England to Irish and Australian parents and was raised in Australia. Widely published and anthologised, Jane is the author of several collections of poems and has featured at readings and festivals in countries including Ireland, Canada, Malaysia and Slovakia. Her poem Whatever else was written during a Hosking Houses Trust Writers’ residency near Stratford-Upon-Avon. Jane lives in Lutruwita/Tasmania. For more: janecwilliams.com

Paris Rosemont is an Asian-Australian poet and author of Banana Girl (2023) and Barefoot Poetess (2025). Her debut was long and shortlisted for Poetry Book Awards 2024 in Australia, Greece and the UK, and was awarded ‘Distinguished Favorite’ in the NYC Independent Press Award 2025 (USA). Paris takes delight in bringing her poetry to life through performance. She has graced stages at events and festivals in almost every state/territory within Australia. Find her at www.parisrosemont.com

Elaine O’Connor raised two children as a solo parent, which drove her into the Civil Service, where imaginative writing was not unknown. Returning to real creative writing, her stories, No Competition and Carmel were Highly Commended in the Historical Writers Association (2024) & Bedford Competitions (2025). The Long Road Home, (unpublished) was short-listed in the Cinnamon Press First Novel competition (2025).  Her next novel, The Herbalists, traces a devout young Victorian woman’s descent to murder. Current ambitions? Find an agent and get those novels published.

 

 

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SHORT-LIST in alphabetical order. (72 poems. Total entry was 1,886) 

Alan Coombe	On the 468 bus
Anne Casey	Night flier
Anne Casey	Shift
Anne Casey	Mal at Mothar
Brian Hill	Egyptian Soul
Carolyn Curtis-Mahoney	Fairy Dust
Christopher Watson	Cicuta / Water Hemlock
Dean Gessie	a theory of everything
Derek Dickinson	Irish Nocturne
Derval Walsh	How to Write a Love Poem
Derval Walsh	Soldiers
Di Slaney	Why changing a duvet is like writing a poem
Doreen Gurrey	Adam and Eve
Elaine O’Connor	Kells Turning
Gail Ingram	Homesick (or imposter syndrome)
Ian Egan	The Poem as Poem
Jane Williams	Whatever else
Jim Conwell	Father Fitzgerald
Johanna Magin	The Prophet Is Dead
Johanna Magin	There ought to be a poem
Johanna Magin	The Fact of Living
Johanna Magin	Small Fires
Johanna Magin	In One Room With a Question
Johanna Magin	Rage Becomes Her
Johanna Magin	Solastalgia
Johanna Magin	10 Bucks
John Bourke	Komorebi
John Walsh	Fenian Dead
John Williams	The Cook’s Shipwreck
Kate Bailey Wilson	On Meeting Shakespeare in the Supermarket
Kathy Miles	Bees
Kerry Gray	Sun setting over Ardglass harbour
Kizziah Burton	If you are taken like Persephone
Kizziah Burton	This Wood I Am of Owl and Ghost
Lou Amyx	When My People Come
Lydia Kennaway	Incident – Recurring Dream No 5
Lynnda Wardle	How far away would you need to be
Marcella Remund	Spirals
Marian Brannigan	Letters from Anamar School 1969
Mary Catherine Lake	The whole length of the long road
Mary Mulholland	Sister, rewind
Matt Hohner	At a Friend’s Grave on His Birthday
Michael Andrew Coverson	Bulls Head Car Park, January 1964
Michael Lavers	The Harvesters
Michael Lavers	On Cabbages
Michael Lavers	Darkness and Rain
Michael Miller	hanging out
Michael Swan	SGM
Michelle Dennehy	Reasons the Goddess Persists in Persuit of the National School Teacher who is the Pure Image of Eamon de Valera
Mike Baynham	QUARTET
Miranda Saake	Rapunzel
Nancy Schoenberger	13 Miller’s Court: Mary Jane Kelly
Paris Rosemont	The Fisherboy’s Knots
Partridge Boswell	Aubade to My Phlebotomist
Patricia Sheppard	Intake at the Juvenile Detention Centre
Patrick Keedy Brown	This Is Not A New Story
paul Newton	The Beginning and the End
Peggy Acott	Town Center Village Assisted Living Facility
Pratibha Castle	THE DAY MY FATHER LOITERS IN THE STREET
Robin Schwarz	Fire in the Palisades
Robin Schwarz	Last August
Seamus Scanlon	Where it Counts
Seamus Scanlon	Blitzcrieg at the Library
Seamus Scanlon	Winnie Battle
Sharon Black	Billy Collins in the Old Coachhouse, En-suite
Shoshauna Shy	(No) Return to Sender
Sue Burge	A zuihitsu on how everything is about my estranged father
Susanne Kennedy	Lawn Sprinkler
Susanne Kennedy	Spirit Level
Susanne Kennedy	Swimming in the Wet
Susanne Kennedy	Turkey Swan Raptor
Vaughan Hoy	Montblanc
Wes Lee	Prayer at the Cove

 

 

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LONG-LIST in alphabetical order. (242 poems. Total entry was 1,886) 

 

Agnes Dussault	Maybe I keep breaking all of my cellphones because
Áine Rose Connell	The Anxious Brain Resides West of Amygdala Creek
Alan Coombe	Troy Town
Alan Coombe	On the 468 bus
Alan Coombe	On the 468 bus
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana	Mash-up of Moments in Shizuoka Prefecture
Allen Shadow	Hunter and Me
Anita Gail Tucker	Mother’s Ruin
Anita Gail Tucker	Ashore
Anne Casey	Shift
Anne Casey	Night flier
Anne Casey	Shift
Anne Casey	Mal at Mothar
Anne Cousins	HOLY
Annette Sisson	True North, Tracings, Seizing the Throne
Anthony Lawrence	Listening to James Wright Read…
Bill Richardson	Passage Tomb
Bill Richardson	The Saint’s Eyes, Fixed To The Floor, Shed Eternal Tears
Brian Hill	Egyptian Soul
Carolyn Curtis-Mahoney	Fairy Dust
Christopher Stocks	The Last of England
Christopher Watson	Smoke Tree
Christopher Watson	Learning to Read
Christopher Watson	Cicuta / Water Hemlock
Christopher Watson	Cicuta / Water Hemlock
Cindy Snow	Relearning the World
Clif Mason	Auabade
Colette Tennant	Trying to Remember What I Never Knew About my Grandmother
Daniel Dempster	Saltmetallemonspit
David Austin	Home.
Dean Gessie	a theory of everything
Derek Dickinson	Blue Morpho
Derek Dickinson	Icebox Aphorisms
Derek Dickinson	Irish Nocturne
Derval Walsh	How to Write a Love Poem
Derval Walsh	Soldiers
Di Slaney	I am a contract killer
Di Slaney	Me and Mrs Jones
Di Slaney	Road trips
Di Slaney	The little kist
Di Slaney	The weather is another animal
Di Slaney	Eighth poem – Tomato love
Di Slaney	Two horses running through the streets of central London
Di Slaney	Tenth poem – Why changing a duvet is like writing a poem
Donna Harlan	Suspension
Doreen Gurrey	Adam and Eve
Dragana Lazici	I try to explain my four identities to a stranger at a dinner party
Elaine O’Connor	Kells Turning
Elaine O’Connor	Kells Turning
Elena Croitoru	The Likeness
Elisa Alt	Everyone You’ve Ever Loved
Elizabeth Palmerton	Mississippi Barn
Elizabeth Whyatt	Hop Pickers
Elizabeth Whyatt	Anthems
Emma Goldman-Sherman	[Let there be a world of slowness]
Emma Murf	What to Do If You’re Stuck in a Conversation About Fishing
Emma Neale	Matinée Performance in my Aunt and Uncle’s Garden
Fokkina McDonnell	Love poem written on a Zoom workshop with tutor interventions
G. Smyth Bernes	The heat of his touch
Gail Ingram	Homesick (or imposter syndrome)
Gavin Duffy	Stare Down
Geraldine Stoneham	Letter to Fleur Adcock, c. 1995
Hajri Aga	The Anatomy of a Goat
Harry Bauld	Visiting the Book
Helen Bar Lev	Ceasefire
Helen Pinoff	ORDER
Ian Chambers	Morning Cuppa
Ian Egan	The Poem as Poem
Imogen Osborne	Flies
Irene Evans	Forecast
Jane Williams	Whatever else
Janice Warman	I’ve made a list of things for you to worry about
JAX AINSLEY-RITCHIE	MEDITATION ON MY LEFT HAND
JAX AINSLEY-RITCHIE	Jaws
JAX AINSLEY-RITCHIE	HYACINTHS IN THE HALLWAY
JAX AINSLEY-RITCHIE	Questions for the Oracle
JAX AINSLEY-RITCHIE	In The Kitchen
JAX AINSLEY-RITCHIE	OUT IN THE WOODS
Jean Tuomey	Unannounced
Jed Myers	Poem to My Partner on Her Birthday
Jed Myers	Reflection
Jennifer Dunlop	Ravelling Hope
Jim Conwell	Father Fitzgerald
Johanna Magin	Ode to Ellipses
Johanna Magin	What They Never Tell You
Johanna Magin	Chaos de Huelgoat
Johanna Magin	The New Order
Johanna Magin	We’ve Eaten War
Johanna Magin	10 Bucks
Johanna Magin	The Prophet Is Dead
Johanna Magin	There ought to be a poem
Johanna Magin	The Fact of Living
Johanna Magin	Small Fires
Johanna Magin	In One Room With a Question
Johanna Magin	Rage Becomes Her
Johanna Magin	Solastalgia
Johanna Magin	10 Bucks
John Bourke	Komorebi
John Bourke	Komorebi
John Stapleton	Camus on the Beach
John Stapleton	The End of Encyclopaedias
John Stapleton	Winter Warriors
John Walsh	Fenian Dead
John Williams	Taseko’s Hands
John Williams	The Cook’s Shipwreck
Joseph Hoban	Two Windows
Judith Thurley	The Wind
Julian Wakeling	Samuel Palmer Moon
Karen J McDonnell	Tidal
Kate Bailey Wilson	On Meeting Shakespeare in the Supermarket
Katherine Bonamo	One Last Meeting, On Zoom
Katherine Hahn Falk	Wasted Time
Kathy Miles	1950’s Mothers
Kathy Miles	Washerwoman
Kathy Miles	Bees
Kerry Gray	Sun setting over Ardglass harbour
Kevin Brodie	Tremors
Kevin Smith	A Corner On Bombowlee Creek Road
Kevin Smith	Boulder
Kim Maley	dry
Kizziah Burton	This is a portrait of a mother holding a candle in the dark
Kizziah Burton	Teaching a Girl to Talk in Our Language
Kizziah Burton	Wild Strawberries
Kizziah Burton	The Child in the Winds
Kizziah Burton	The Old Road Tells Me The Way is Long and Narrow
Kizziah Burton	I Am Afraid of Dying
Kizziah Burton	Something higher than my soul was trapped
Kizziah Burton	If you are taken like Persephone
Kizziah Burton	This Wood I Am of Owl and Ghost
KP McCarthy	Near to Nether
Lana Holman	Give Me a Day
Lani O’Hanlon	Uile Uice/All Heal
Lani O’Hanlon	For Rain
Lee Stockdale	Oh, Sister
Lesley Sharpe	Spell to quell a storm
Lesley Sharpe	The unbroken line of ink
Lesley Sharpe	Out of season
Lesley Sharpe	Hindsight
Lou Amyx	When My People Come
Lou Amyx	When My People Come
Lou Lesovitch	The Gift
Lydia Kennaway	Incident – Recurring Dream No 5
Lynnda Wardle	How far away would you need to be
Lynne S Viti	Crazy Legs at St. Rita’s Fair
Madeleine Lamm	Louisville
Marcella Remund	Spirals
Marian Brannigan	Letters from Anamar School 1969
Marion Quednau	Ivory
Mary Catherine Lake	Searching for a lost lottery ticket
Mary Catherine Lake	It was written in the margin
Mary Catherine Lake	The whole length of the long road
Mary Mulholland	how to choose a new washing machine
Mary Mulholland	Sister, rewind
Matt Hohner	At a Friend’s Grave on His Birthday
Melanie Tibbs	The Day the Poet Came to Our Town
Michael Andrew Coverson	Bulls Head Car Park, January 1964
Michael Lavers	The Leap
Michael Lavers	On Hearing the Buddhist Describe her Enightenment
Michael Lavers	The Harvesters
Michael Lavers	On Cabbages
Michael Lavers	Darkness and Rain
Michael Miller	hanging out
Michael Pearce	Queen Sidra
Michael Pearce	Bucket of Noise
Michael Shoemaker	détente
Michael Swan	Everything was very interesting
Michael Swan	SGM
Michelle Dennehy	Reasons the Goddess Persists in Persuit of the National School Teacher who is the Pure Image of Eamon de Valera
Mike Baynham	NEVER ONCE
Mike Baynham	COOKING
Mike Baynham	SNOWFALL
Mike Baynham	AN T-EILIAN MUILEACH
Mike Baynham	QUARTET
Miranda Saake	Rapunzel
Nan Montgomery	Common Blue
Nancy Schoenberger	13 Miller’s Court: Mary Jane Kelly
Nancy Steinkraus	Grace
Nicholas Rice	Beacon
Paris Rosemont	The Fisherboy’s Knots
Partridge Boswell	Aubade to My Phlebotomist
Partridge Boswell	Aubade to My Phlebotomist
Patricia Demery	Sticky Lozenge
Patricia Sheppard	Underwater Search and Recovery Unit
Patricia Sheppard	Intake at the Juvenile Detention Centre
Patrick Keedy Brown	This Is Not A New Story
Paul Newton	The Beginning and the End
Paul Newton	The Beginning and the End
Paula Brancato	Love
Peggy Acott	Town Center Village Assisted Living Facility
Peter Lindley	Foundling
Peter Tadd	Quantum High
Phil Hawtin	On Walking from Albert Bridge to Marden
Pratibha Castle	THE DAY MY FATHER LOITERS IN THE STREET
Raymond Ferik	Cloister
Rob Barth	George
Rob Ritchie	Mother, Moon
Robin Schwarz	Fire in the Palisades
Robin Schwarz	Last August
Robin Schwarz	Fire in the Palisades
Robin Schwarz	Last August
Robin Shohet	Parlez-vous Love?
Roger Bonner	Ocean Days
Róisín Leggett Bohan	I Lose My Mother
Róisín Leggett Bohan	We Lost Baby Jesus
Sandy Longley	Please Let Us Know How We Did
Seamus Scanlon	Where it Counts
Seamus Scanlon	Winnie Battle
Seamus Scanlon	Blitzcrieg at the Library
Seán Ó Dálaigh	Crying on the Dancefloor
Seohyun Lee	Poetry Prize Submission
Seth Kronick	Learning to Love the Feeling of Falling
Sharon Black	Billy Collins in the Old Coachhouse, En-suite
Shelley Stenhouse	When a Hand Comes Home with Yo…
Shoshauna Shy	(No) Return to Sender
Sinéad Griffin	Naming a Baby
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier	Budapest
Stephen Pollock	Diabolus in Musica
Sue Burge	A zuihitsu on how everything is about my estranged father
Susan Dines	Imposter Syndrome
Susan Landgraf	Frogs
Susan Taylor	Making Sense
Susanne Kennedy	Lawn Sprinkler
Susanne Kennedy	Spirit Level
Susanne Kennedy	Swimming in the Wet
Susanne Kennedy	Turkey Swan Raptor
Sylvia Cohen	I Talk to my Father Across the Styx
Thomas Williamson	The Last of All I Loved
Tim Relf	Be 100% satisfied EVERY SINGLE TIME
Tom Moore	Lunch Poem
Veronica A. Bettencourt	The Gloomy Octopus
Veronica A. Bettencourt	Panini Maker
V. P. Loggins	Baptism
Vanessa Lampert	Almost Certainly
Vaughan Hoy	Montblanc
Wes Lee	The Newborn
Wes Lee	A City Wakes
Wes Lee	Prayer at the Cove
Terence McGinity	Help is Coming

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

From all of us at Fish, thank you for entering your flash stories. Congratulations to the writers who  were short or long-listed, and in particular to the 10 winners whose flash stories will be published in the Fish Anthology 2025.

The launch will be during the West Cork Literary Festival, Bantry, Ireland – 16 July. Venue: Marino Church, 6.30 pm. It is a free event and all are welcome.

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Winners

Here are the 10 winning Flash Fiction Stories, as chosen by Tania Hershman, to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2025.

Comments (below) on the flash stories are from Tania, who we sincerely thank for her time and expertise. 

 

 

 

FIRST: Lover  by	Allegra Mullan
SECOND: Empty Space   by	Justine Sweeney
THIRD: Breath and Bone   by	Letty Butler
HONORARY MENTIONS (no particular order)
I’ve Lost a Lot of Friends Through Love  by	Ralph Storer
A.W.O.L   by	Lisa Donoghue
For a Good Time, Call . . .   by	Annalisa McMorrow
Leaving in Four   by	Rebekah Clarkson
Picture This   by	Simon Roberts
Transformations   by	Shakira Christodoulou
My Father’s Wedding   by	Xavier Combe

 

Allegra Mullan is a writer of fiction and poetry. She is 23 years old and lives in London. Her work has been published in the Keats-Shelly Review, The Fish Anthology, SomeSuch Magazine and Toe-Rag, amongst others.

Justine Sweeney is from Belfast in the north of Ireland. She writes software code but finds writing fiction much more interesting. Her first collection of stories was shortlisted in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025, and she was shortlisted in the Fish Short Story Award 2025. Her work appears in the Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and other places. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel.

Letty Butler is a writer and performer with a penchant for tarot cards and cheap granola. She writes across multiple genres and has just finished her second novel. This isn’t her first Fish-flavoured rodeo—she landed The Short Story Prize in 2023—and has been trying (and failing) to score a hat-trick ever since. Coming 3rd this year has really egged her on. She’s Brighton-based and represented by Alexander Cochran at Greyhound Literary. 

Ralph Storer is a widely-travelled writer best known for his award-winning series of guidebooks to the Scottish mountains. His other books include Love Scenes (a novel about films and the single life in Edinburgh), The Joy of Hillwalking and The Sex Trivia Quiz Book. He loves to disappear with a tent into the mountains of the American West, while at home he satisfies his love of adventure by attempting to create darkwave music on his computer.

Lisa Donoghue hated every single day she spent at school, so no one was more surprised than her when she became an English teacher.  She left the UK in 2005 to travel the world for a year or two, and twenty years later she has still not returned. She is currently living and teaching in Suzhou, China.

Annalisa McMorrow is an insomniac writer living in rural Northern California. But once upon a time, she lived in Los Angeles, where she worked (in no particular order) as a popcorn girl, masseuse, receptionist, casting assistant, and ghostwriter. She once won a deejay slot by penning a murder mystery in under 50 words. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, on KQED radio, and in multiple magazines that start with the letter “P.”

Rebekah Clarkson lives on Peramangk land in South Australia. Her short story cycle, Barking Dogs is published by Affirm Press. Her award-winning short stories appear in Best Australian Stories and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding Short Stories by Australian Women’(Black Inc.). Her short memoir, Dominion was recently published in The Louisville Review and forms part of a broader memoir/fiction project exploring family, religion, and missing mothers. Rebekah possesses the world’s worst sense of direction.

Simon Roberts is Based in West London. He writes short fiction and plays, and has been nominated for a number of prizes including the Bridport Short Story Prize (2023) and the Cranked Anvil Short Story Prize (2024). He was a finalist in the Plaza Prizes Short Story Award (2024). He makes regular appearances on Story Radio Podcast. Simon’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude premiered at the Questors Theatre last year. Website: Simon Roberts 

Shakira Christodoulou is a slightly niche jack-of-all-trades. Her outsize animal sculptures amused and confused island communities in Britain and Canada, she’s painted murals some liked and some didn’t, led habitat restoration for a tiny Island NGO, and is a novelist and part-time Egyptologist. People have kindly published her words on mummies, cats, and fungus, and asked her for poetry about conservation. She writes on Bluesky, and Youtubes about wildlife gardening, as WellManneredXS.

Xavier Combe is a freelance translator and conference interpreter based in France. He teaches at the University of Paris X. He has authored 2 non-fiction books and a novel in France as well as quite a few (moderately) philological op-eds in the French press. He writes and narrates most of the stories for the award-winning absurdist fiction podcast Muffy Drake produced by 2-time Peabody Award winner Jim Hall. www.muffydrake.com

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Comments from judge, Tania Hershman

 

I had a very very hard time – harder than usual – choosing between my top three stories, it was like comparing an apple with a fighter jet with a grain of sand. Since I am not allowed to present a three-way tie, I made the choices I was required to make with only a nanogap between these three brilliant pieces. For me, they are sublime examples of the enormity of what can be conveyed in a flash story, and not just what happens but how the writer decides to bring it to us, the effect of shapes and forms on the page and how they intrigue the reader’s eye as well as the language, the characters, the story.

 

I found it fascinating, having judged no small number of short and short short fiction competitions, that this time there were almost no fancy, weird, complicated titles across the shortlist I was given to read. A title can do a great deal of work, especially for short pieces, whether prose, poetry or hybrids, and I think it’s worth keeping in mind and spending some time on. A title might come straight away, or might emerge slowly as you work on a piece, or afterwards. Sometimes the simplest of titles, just one or two words, is exactly right, but sometimes more is actually more!

 

Anyway, without further ado, congratulations first to the longlist, the shortlist, and, in fact, everyone who sends their work out into the world to be not only read but judged. It is an act of courage, of optimism, please keep doing it! And now, please congratulate my three prize-winning flash stories, all of whom rose up out of the shortlist the first time I read them, immedately going into my “Yes” pile, and then offered me more and more and more each time I re-read them. It was an honour to be asking to present my choices, and a privilege to read these stories, which will stay with me for a very long time.

 

1^st prize:

Lover by Allegra Mullan

If someone asked what happens in this tiny story, I’d find it hard to answer. In some ways, almost nothing, and from another angle, everything. I was immediately drawn in by the first line, and felt myself assuming how this flash would go. I was utterly delighted to be proved so wrong! The third line started to hint that this was not at all what I had thought it might be. The use of the “you” point of view is perfect, we are seeing through their eyes someone they love, someone they try and understand, looking at so closely that they even notice inside their lover’s mouth. It is intense, intimate, and with a gorgeous oddness in what the writer chooses to include: incongruities, strange pairings, critique of our consumerist society, life and death, tenderness, pain and love – and all in one paragraph. A triumph.

 

2^nd prize:

Empty Space by Justine Sweeney

Before even reading this wrenching flash story, seeing it on the page immediately intrigued me, with its playing with form. “Show don’t tell” is a “writing rule” I strongly object to; there are no rules, writers should write what they want in the way that want to write it. That said, I loved what this writer was showing me visually before I’d even stepped into the opening line. The reason I chose this as the second prize winner was because this writer took a plot which might have slipped into cliché and made it completely their own. I was there, I felt and heard what the narrator was feeling and thinking. It was visceral, personal, painful, finished and unfinished in that perfect way I love in a short short story, where you know it’s over and you can’t stop thinking about it.

 

3^rd prize:

Breath & Bone by Letty butler

Once again, a story we have heard before, and, once again, a writer takes it and makes it their own, makes it so much more than simply an account of what happens on this one day. Here we have an “I” and a “you”, and we are in that space between them, which is difficult and uncomfortable, made even more so by the excellent use of pacing. The shape of this poignant flash – two short one-sentence paragraphs at the beginning and end, and in the middle, a long one-sentence section – is so well done, as is the precise choice of words and phrases like “fractured”, “snarl”, “guzzling”, and “quiet terror”. This is everything a stunning flash can be, a whole life and a whole world in half a page.

 

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A LITTLE ABOUT THE WINNERS:

Allegra Mullan is a writer of fiction and poetry. She is 23 years old and lives in London. Her work has been published in the Keats-Shelly Review, The Fish Anthology, SomeSuch Magazine and Toe-Rag, amongst others.

Justine Sweeney is from Belfast in the north of Ireland. She writes software code but finds writing fiction much more interesting. Her first collection of stories was shortlisted in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025, and she was shortlisted in the Fish Short Story Award 2025. Her work appears in the Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and other places. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel.

Letty Butler is a writer and performer with a penchant for tarot cards and cheap granola. She writes across multiple genres and has just finished her second novel. This isn’t her first Fish-flavoured rodeo—she landed The Short Story Prize in 2023—and has been trying (and failing) to score a hat-trick ever since. Coming 3rd this year has really egged her on. She’s Brighton-based and represented by Alexander Cochran at Greyhound Literary. 

Ralph Storer is a widely-travelled writer best known for his award-winning series of guidebooks to the Scottish mountains. His other books include Love Scenes (a novel about films and the single life in Edinburgh), The Joy of Hillwalking and The Sex Trivia Quiz Book. He loves to disappear with a tent into the mountains of the American West, while at home he satisfies his love of adventure by attempting to create darkwave music on his computer.

Lisa Donoghue hated every single day she spent at school, so no one was more surprised than her when she became an English teacher.  She left the UK in 2005 to travel the world for a year or two, and twenty years later she has still not returned. She is currently living and teaching in Suzhou, China.

Annalisa McMorrow is an insomniac writer living in rural Northern California. But once upon a time, she lived in Los Angeles, where she worked (in no particular order) as a popcorn girl, masseuse, receptionist, casting assistant, and ghostwriter. She once won a deejay slot by penning a murder mystery in under 50 words. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, on KQED radio, and in multiple magazines that start with the letter “P.”

Rebekah Clarkson lives on Peramangk land in South Australia. Her short story cycle, Barking Dogs is published by Affirm Press. Her award-winning short stories appear in Best Australian Stories and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding Short Stories by Australian Women’(Black Inc.). Her short memoir, Dominion was recently published in The Louisville Review and forms part of a broader memoir/fiction project exploring family, religion, and missing mothers.  Rebekah possesses the world’s worst sense of direction.

Simon Roberts is Based in West London. He writes short fiction and plays, and has been nominated for a number of prizes including the Bridport Short Story Prize (2023) and the Cranked Anvil Short Story Prize (2024). He was a finalist in the Plaza Prizes Short Story Award (2024). He makes regular appearances on Story Radio Podcast. Simon’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude premiered at the Questors Theatre last year. Website: Simon Roberts 

Shakira Christodoulou is a slightly niche jack-of-all-trades. Her outsize animal sculptures amused and confused island communities in Britain and Canada, she’s painted murals some liked and some didn’t, led habitat restoration for a tiny Island NGO, and is a novelist and part-time Egyptologist. People have kindly published her words on mummies, cats, and fungus, and asked her for poetry about conservation. She writes on Bluesky, and Youtubes about wildlife gardening, as WellManneredXS.

 

 

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Short-list:

(Alphabetical order: 30 stories)

 

Alan Gray	Memorable Houses in English Literature
Aline Soules	Abscission
Allegra Antonia Mullan	Lover
Annalisa McMorrow	For a Good Time, Call…
David Antares	Baby
David Stephens	Getting away with it
Gill O’Halloran	The First Rule Of Prostate Club
Ivan Debel	The Author
Joanna Miller	Catching the Moment
Joe Evans	Search History
John Mulligan	Don’t ring this number
John Mulligan	Parking cars and pumping gas
Julie Evans	Gallery: Portrait 1916 (Oil on Canvas)
Justine Sweeney	Empty Space
Karon Alderman	The Hobby Hearse
Letty Butler	Breath & Bone
Lisa Donoghue	A.W.O.L
Lucille Agapov	Beautiful Monster
Neil Oughton	Dance Teacher
Ralph Storer	I’ve Lost a Lot of Friends Through Love
Rebekah Clarkson	Leaving in Four
Rich Buley-Neumar	The Spicy Stuff Eating Contest
Roger Lightfoot	Black Thursday. Spain
Roger Lightfoot	A Room at the Inn
Roger Lightfoot	Young Dylan’s Muse
Shakira Christodoulou	Transformations
Simon Roberts	Picture This
Susan Bennett	The Things That Matter
Tom Bryan	Eevie, Ivy, Over
Virginia Miranda	Adonis
Xavier Combe	My Father’s Wedding

 

 

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Long-list:

In alphabetical order (100)

 

Adana Keane	Lisa Gherardini
Alan Egan	Ruby
Alan Gray	Memorable Houses in English Literature
Aline Soules	Abscission
Allegra Antonia Mullan	Lover
Amy Goodman-Bide	Louise
Andrew Trimble	Overheard I
Andrew Trimble	Overheard II
Anna Hopwood	The Accident
Annalisa McMorrow	For a Good Time, Call
Aspasia Sparages	Fibreboard and January
Barbara Mogerley	Broken Dolls
BRUCE POWELL	Stage Fright
Caroline Clark	Salo
cathy leonard	Vanity Case
Cathy Sampson	The Hunter’s Moon
Chris Cottom	Last Year of English Lit
Chris Phillips	Our flammable selves
Conor Montague	Lovebirds
Dale Marie	The Nautical
Darren Moorhouse	Burnt Threads
Davey Freedman	Bamboo
David Antares	Baby
David Lovell	A Trip to the Park
David Stephens	An Affair of the Heart
David Stephens	Getting away with it
Douglas Cochran	Off Marla
Fiona Ritchie Walker	Shang-a-Lang
Genevieve Methot	The Five-Year Frontier
Gerald Inberg	Anywhere Elementary
Gill O’halloran	The First Rule Of Prostate Club
Henry Hudson	Nothing but the truth
Isabelle Shifrin	Water Bitch
Ivan Debel	The Author
Jeffrey Buppert	Magnolia Pearl
Jeffrey Buppert	So Much Left To Say
Jessica Magee	Black and white
Jim Gleeson	Downward Dog
Jo Skinner	Black Man Running
Joanna Miller	Catching the Moment
Joe Evans	Search History
John Fullman	Scattering My Father’s Ashes
John Mulligan	Don’t ring this number
John Mulligan	One man against the mountain
John Mulligan	Parking cars and pumping gas
John Shirey	Lasting Marriage
Jonny Moore	A Lesson in Boyhood
Julie Evans	Gallery: Portrait 1916 (Oil on Canvas)
Justine Sweeney	Empty Space
K. T. Downs	Apricots and Other Fruit
Karon Alderman	The Hobby Hearse
Katie Beck	The 12th annual dance marathon
Keith Wood	The Portobello Elemental
Kerrie Penney	Black Widows
Kevin MacAlan	Frank
Kevin MacAlan	Housebound
Laura Kyle	T For Transient
Letty Butler	Breath & Bone
Lisa Donoghue	A.W.O.L
Lucille Agapov	Beautiful Monster
Marcus Moore	Things Joburgers did and didn’t tell you before you moved to the Orange Farm township.
Mel Fawcett	Laughing at the Moon
Nancy Freund	Burhan Now or Never
Neil Oughton	Dance Teacher
Niall Rodgers	In search of tiny life
Nicholas Matsas	Getting the Part
Nickie Foley	Smeltin’
Paul Currion	Appetite
Peter Howard	Saskia
Peter Slater	Hands
Philip Wilson	You’ve Been Framed
Phoebe Robertson	Aquarium
Ralph Storer	I’ve Lost a Lot of Friends Through Love
Rebekah Clarkson	Leaving in Four
Rebekah Clarkson	The Night Runners
Rich Buley-Neumar	The Spicy Stuff Eating Contest
Richard Scarsbrook	Blue Line
Richard Scarsbrook	Violets
Roger Lightfoot	Black Thursday. Spain
Roger Lightfoot	A Room at the Inn
Roger Lightfoot	Young Dylan’s Muse
Ronnie Nixon	ALLOTMENTS
Ronnie Nixon	RETROSPECTIVE
Samarth Bhasin	Mr. Masters
Shakira Christodoulou	Transformations
Siân Quill	skinny witch
Simon Roberts	Picture This
Simon Roberts	What About Vienna?
Steph Lay	What burns beneath
Sue Ryan	The Prisoner
Susan Bennett	The Things That Matter
Susan L. Edser	Swipe Right
susan lake	Lucy
Taurenelle Mononym	She should be walking by now
The Vinh Nguyen	The Promotion
Tom Bryan	Eevie, Ivy, Over
Tom Bryan	Hamish and the Hoolies
Virginia Miranda	Adonis
Xavier Combe	Jude
Xavier Combe	My Father’s Wedding