Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

On behalf of all of us at Fish, we congratulate the 10 winners who made it to the Fish Anthology 2023, and to those writers who made the long and short-lists, well done too. 

Thank you to Sean Lusk, for the time and enthusiasm that he put into selecting the winners. (About Sean’s novel.)

 

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The 10 Winners:

Selected by Sean Lusk.

 

FIRST

My Mother’s Daughter:
by Anneke Bender  (USA)

 

SECOND

The Dead on Street View:
by Nuala Roche  (Ireland)

 

THIRD

Escape Van:
by Sabine Casparie (UK)

 

 

HONORARY MENTIONS

A Brown Night: by Thelma McGough  (UK)

 

 

 

 

Speaking of Love: by Kathryn Phelan  (Ireland)

 

 

Of Many Things I have no clear remembrance: by Dani Salvadori  (UK)

 

 

Bravo India Lima: by Olivia Rana  (N Ireland)

 

 

For Richer, Poorer and Doritos: by Cheryl Miller-Fitzgerald (USA)

 

 

Except for One Thing: by Thomas Darlington Crancer (USA)

 

 

 

Notes from judge, Sean Lusk:

These memoirs took me on quite the journey – from the Grand Canyon to Tokyo, from Dublin to Colorado, from London to Poland. But a memoir is a journey in time, and many of these memoirs pinpointed the precise feeling of loss and longing and desire that memories evoke in us. Many were adventurous with form, being in the true sense ‘hybrid’ syntheses of essay, article, and story.

The winning memoirs (and it was hard to choose first, second, third and beyond) seemed to me to perfectly encapsulate the memoir, rising above form to call up a memory that felt intensely true and personal – at once particular and yet also universal. Except for One Thingis a tender, heartfelt account of coming to terms with grief. For Richer, Poorer and Doritos is beautifully observed, its sadness tinged with humour and, ultimately, acceptance. Bravo India Lima is a powerful and superbly observed memoir of the troubles in Northern Ireland, taking us from the eighties through the Good Friday Agreement and almost to the present day. Of Many Things I Have No Clear Remembranceis a collision of memories of words, artefacts and poems, a hybrid piece that captures the often fractured and uncertain nature of remembrance. Speaking of Loveis an enormously assured piece of writing, a story of a relationship told with deft sensuality and the troubling uncertainty of loss. Death by Overworkis a fascinating piece, set in Tokyo, the routine horror of train suicides punctuated by an English teacher’s regular conversations with his student, and a developing obsession with a woman merely glimpsed. It makes an unfamiliar culture seem both more alien and yet also intensely known. A Brown Nightis a harrowing story of a father’s attempt to take his own life, and the bravery of a nine-year-old girl who saves him and, in doing so, also saves herself. I found it very moving.

 Third placed story Escape Vanis another story that features psychological trauma and thoughts of suicide. Its honesty, the clarity of the writing and its redemptive quality are profoundly felt. It’s also written with quiet subtlety, with ever greater detail as the narrator responds once more to what life has to give. I thought it wonderful.

Second placed story, The Dead on Street Viewsurprised me. At first I feared it was going to be a lecture, with its dictionary definitions of the word ‘gatch’ (geáitse) and quotations, but it had me ensnared as the narrator observed the particular bend in their son’s neck, and then moved into the uses (and abuses) of google street view, and the notion that we are always looking back at the dead, as street view looks back in time. I thought it ingenious, and the ingenuity increased as the memoir made its case, and as the writing grew more lyrical and with such beautifully placed lines as ‘Each way lay an impaling’ and the aunt who says: ‘I’d like to know what I could’ve been.’ It’s well worth reading two or three times, this memoir, because it captures that longing for loss – lost time, lost moments, lost lives that is the epitome of memoir, while also playing skilfully with form.

 And finally, our first-placed story My Mother’s Daughter. This, it seems to me, does everything a memoir should – the slightly uncertain beginning, as the walk in the Grand Canyon is repeated three times through different photographs, reflecting the way memories come to us, initially uncertain before we impose our own sense and our own story upon them. The specificity of detail is so beautiful – the van, the lab, the trinkets. The relationship of the daughter with the mother, the ex-nun with a mischievous, even anarchic streak – is rendered perfectly. And their first moment of parting, the opening movement in the long parting to come, is simply exquisite. I was deeply touched by this memoir, as I was by so many I read. Judging these has truly been an honour. 

 

 

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SHORT-LIST (43, in alphabetical order. There were 879 entries)

Boxes, Crates and Plastic-shrouded Pallets	Mara	Adamitz Scrupe
Ghosts	Amal	Alhomsi
From Enchanted Garden to Beguiling Seas	Clare	Allcard
My Mother’s Daughter	Anneke	Bender
Eggshells	Eleanor	Blake
ORPHEUS AFTER	Partridge	Boswell
Nozzy	Adam	Brown
Snake Handling	Grant	Buday
Escape Van	Sabine	Casparie
Still	Sarah Easter	Collins
Conversations in Hull	Sarah Easter	Collins
The Chevrotain	Lisa	Cortez
Exceot for one Thing	Thomas	Crancer
St Columba’s Curse	Sarah	Davies
Red and White	Wisteria	Deng
Cocoon	Yvonne	Fein
For Richer, Poorer and Doritos	Cheryl	Fitzgerald
My mum was a gardener	Sarah	Forbes
A Tale from the Silk Road	Stephen	Hayden
Beasts and Burdens	Emma	Hillier
A True Story About Mrs Smith	Rory	KILALEA
Rincon el Diablo	John	Ledford
Consider the Octopus	Francesca	Leonie
Deep Songs	Francesca	Leonie
Essay	Asya	Likhman
The first funeral	Harriet	Mason
Walking on Walls	Thelma	McGough
Tukwila Gold and Pawn	Nikita	Minkin
The year the clocks stopped	Clar	Ni Chonghaile
How I Came to Spend Christmas in a Psychiatric Facility	Lauren	O’Donovan
Speaking of Love	Kathryn	Phelan
Standing in the Rain	Stephen	Policoff
Clip	Jay	Prosser
Bravo, India, Lima.	Olivia	Rana
Teach/Each/Ache: Notes from the Fulton County Jail	Stuart	Robbins
The Dead on Street View	Nuala	Roche
Slammakin	Ailsa	Ross
Of many things I have no clear remembrance	Dani	Salvadori
Carrying the Griefcase or Death by Overwork	James	Scoles
A Walk Home	Michelle	Scorziello
The Distance Between Things	Carrie	Seymour
The Pink Hibiscus	Charlene	Smith
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Breast Cancer: Act I—Chemotherapy—Begins	Katie	Snyder

 

 

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LONG-LIST (104. In Alphabetical Order. There were 879 entries)

Boxes, Crates and Plastic-shrouded Pallets	Mara	Adamitz Scrupe
Ghosts	Amal	Alhomsi
From Enchanted Garden to Beguiling Seas	Clare	Allcard
The Strange Legacy of a Diminutive Ghost	Anneke	Bender
My Mother’s Daughter	Anneke	Bender
Eggshells	Eleanor	Blake
Patriots’ Day	Partridge	Boswell
ORPHEUS AFTER	Partridge	Boswell
A Fiery Solace	Kevin	Brophy
Nozzy	Adam	Brown
Snake Handling	Grant	Buday
Dry Stone	James Roderick	Burns
Karmageddon	Lynn	Bushell
The Yellow Door	Mairéad	Carew
Escape Van	Sabine	Casparie
The Initiation	Jaineba	Chang
Shipwrecks	Stephanie	Colburn
Still	Sarah Easter	Collins
Conversations in Hull	Sarah Easter	Collins
My sister	jane	cornes maclean
The Chevrotain	Lisa	Cortez
Exceot for one Thing	Thomas	Crancer
Microwave Dinners & MTV	sally	cranswick
The Performance of Grief	Claudia	Cruttwell
Confession	Sarah	Davies
St Columba’s Curse	Sarah	Davies
Leaving Home	Teresa	DeCrescenzo
Red and White	Wisteria	Deng
Edith L. Slocum	Tim	Dennis
Names Will Never Again Hurt Me	Deirdre	Devally
The Gravy Train	Garret	Dwyer Joyce
Cocoon	Yvonne	Fein
For Richer, Poorer and Doritos	Cheryl	Fitzgerald
Do-Overs	Adrian	Fleur
My mum was a gardener	Sarah	Forbes
Last Dogs	Michael	Forester
The Lives We Leave Behind	Sally	Fox
This is Us	Sally	Fox
Zulu	TOM	FOX
Dear Mum	Joyce	Fox
The Other Half of Everything	Adrian	Fox
Casting On	Jane	Fraser
A Life in Three Plaits.	Ruth	Geldard
A Tale from the Silk Road	Stephen	Hayden
Beasts and Burdens	Emma	Hillier
Thirsty	Marcella	Hourihane
The Rocky Road	Rosemary	Johnston
Is Today Tuesday	Ann	Jolly
The Ash	Rosemary	Jones
A True Story About Mrs Smith	Rory	KILALEA
THE YEAR OF DEAD DAYS	Alice	Langley
Rincon el Diablo	John	Ledford
Consider the Octopus	Francesca	Leonie
Deep Songs	Francesca	Leonie
Essay	Asya	Likhman
Diary of an Iranian Schoolgirl	Mahta	Mansouri
The first funeral	Harriet	Mason
Flirting with the Pentecostals	Helen	McClements
Bare Naked Magic	Eileen	McFalls
Walking on Walls	Thelma	McGough
Tukwila Gold and Pawn	Nikita	Minkin
The Prodigal Son	Victoria	Mizen
Someone Young	Hannah	Morphet
The End	Carla	Myers
The year the clocks stopped	Clar	Ni Chonghaile
Flames	Marilyn	Nunney
How I Came to Spend Christmas in a Psychiatric Facility	Lauren	O’Donovan
He Waits for Me	fiona	O’Sullivan
Small and Lucky: One Mind’s Memoir	Kevin	ONeill
Speaking of Love	Kathryn	Phelan
Standing in the Rain	Stephen	Policoff
Problems in the Buying of Shampoo	Peter	Pool
Clip	Jay	Prosser
Mother of happiness	Marianne	Puxley
I Choose the Music	Marion	Quednau
Bravo, India, Lima	Olivia	Rana
Bravo, India, Lima.	Olivia	Rana
Crocodile Shoes	Jeff	Richards
Running in Thistles	Alina	Rios
Teach/Each/Ache: Notes from the Fulton County Jail	Stuart	Robbins
The Dead on Street View	Nuala	Roche
Slammakin	Ailsa	Ross
Goree Island	Zurina	Saban
Of many things I have no clear remembrance	Dani	Salvadori
A Daughter to Watch Over Her	Cathy	Schen
Blueberries	Anne	Schuchman
The Mommy Friends	Anne	Schuchman
Carrying the Griefcase or Death by Overwork	James	Scoles
A Walk Home	Michelle	Scorziello
The Distance Between Things	Carrie	Seymour
The Greyhound	Alan	Sincic
Brick by Brick	Vicki	Siska
Demolitions	Ruskin	Smith
The Pink Hibiscus	Charlene	Smith
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Breast Cancer: Act I—Chemotherapy—Begins	Katie	Snyder
Into the shadows; a memoir	Hayley	Solomon
A World Away	Charity	Starrett
Fathers’ Day	Claire	Steele
THE GREAT ONE	Michal Gregory	Stephens
Noli Me Tangere	Pamela	Swanborough
The Blue Curtain	Jackie	Taylor
It Never Rains in Wycombe	Jennifer	Twomey
Good Girl	Kayla Pica	Williams
Himalayan Sunset	Scott	Winkler

 

 

Comments from Judge, Sarah Hall:

Reading short stories is one of the most nerve-wracking experiences. You never know
what you are going to get as a reader, and as a critic. This is not just because they
showcase disquiet, tension, subversion and surprise, but because the form itself is so
difficult, so exacting, even punishing to attempt, and it remains, very often, an un-
mastered discipline.

But I was delighted to find so many skilled pieces in the entries this year, stories that
were gem-like, compressed and glinting, little worlds in entirety that refracted life and
ideas, and created a hinterland around their borders. Pieces that were written by
authors who really understood short story metrics – economy, traction, mood,
schematics, potency, negative space, and irresolution.

I was also heartened to experience a variety of themes and styles, because the form,
for all its limits, is oddly flexible, open to innovation, experimentation and originality,
a staging ground for a host of topics and landscapes and human goings-on. It is hard
to summarize these entries, other than to say, as always, existentialist DNA was deep
there, from which a myriad of ideas, tales and explorations branched out.

What a joy! What a joy to experience in these stories the many versions of us, told in
so many different ways, small episodes pushing up against big themes, propositions
and provocations that expand any restrictions we might make for ourselves, socially,
politically, or textually. What a joy to be transported to so many different places
around the globe, and into speculative futures, and back into the disputable past.
Yes, the reading was truly nerve-wracking, but for all the right reasons.

 

A little about the winners:

Letty Butler is a writer, actress, comedienne, creative coach and chronically indecisive. She’s based in a tiny flat in Sheffield, writes across multiple genres and has just finished her debut novel, Escape Artists. Letty’s always got multiple projects on the bubble due to a low boredom threshold. She’s currently working on her debut collection of short fiction and is developing a 12-part comedy series for screen, alongside award-winning director, Juliet May (Motherland, Miranda). 

Nicholas Petty is a British writer living in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His short fiction has previously been listed for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and has appeared in The Moth, The London Magazine, Short Fiction Journal, and elsewhere. When he’s not at his desk, he can be found on a sunny terrace with a plate of bitterballen and a tiny Dutch beer.

Dylan Garity is a writer and editor originally from Oregon, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. As a spoken word poet, he has toured around the United States, performing at a wide variety of venues and winning the college national poetry slam with Macalester College. He cofounded and served as vice president of Button Poetry for many years, and now works as a freelance fiction editor. “Autophile” is his first published short story.

Roger Vickery rescued this story from a shelter. From the jump, it whined, barked, scratched, and shat out demands to be re-located to a sunny home. Drawing on his multi-vocational (ADHD?) background Roger employed marketing wiles, legal arguments, military tactics, teaching aids and sailing tacks to up-sell the ingrate. Failure. Then he remembered The Fish. They’re a soft touch… accepted his poetry pup in 2015… maybe they’re open to a new stray?   

Allegra Mullan is twenty-two years old and lives in North London. She has had work published in the Keats Shelley review, the Penguin First Story anthology, the 2016 Foyles Young Poets anthology, and Rotters Magazine. When she is not on her phone, Allegra enjoys watching film trailers and walking. She is currently studying Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and working as a chef.

Emma Neale lives and works in Dunedin, New Zealand, as a freelance editor and occasional creative writing tutor. The published author of novels, poetry and short fiction, she is also the mother of two sons. Her husband works as a theoretical physicist; her sons like to say this family background of  ‘physics and poetry’ has clearly led directly to their own divergent passions: jazz percussion and basketball. 

Josephine Rowe is the author of three story collections and a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, published in the UK by Tuskar Rock Press. She was a 2021-2022 fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers, and a 2022 Writer in Residence at Literaturhaus Zürich. She has recently returned to Australia and is living in coastal Victoria, working on a new novel and sleep. Her latest collection of stories is Here Until August. 

Josh Wagner spent his early years in California before his folks dragged him off to Montana, where he learned to love a bit of solitude. He has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and is currently living in West Cork working on a baffling PhD concerning forests, grief, embodiment and spectrality. He dabbles in music, filmmaking and theatre, but the art of fiction will always be his first and most abiding love.

Hanako Senzoku has spent half her life in Melbourne, Australia and half as a returnee in Tokyo, Japan – her sense of what constitutes a barbeque is a present source of consternation, and writing an ever-guiding star. She is perpetually filled with wonder and confusion, and an appetite for delicious things. 

 

 

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Short-list:

(alphabetical order) There are 45 stories on the short-list. (There were  1,392 entries in total).

Title	First Name	Last Name
Hanna. With Two Ns.	Peter-Adrian	Altini
Borrowed Bones	Rita	Ariyoshi
Binoculars	Alex	Baines
How to rescue a cat	Liz	Barnard
The Martyr’s Brother	Paul	Bassett Davies
The Jewelled Sea	Paul	Bassett Davies
Mobile	Maryanne	Berry
The Approximate Distance in Light Years Between Us	Mike	Carson
Pomegranate	RAND RICHARDS	COOPER
Mending Wall	Mark	Edwards
Karma	Mark	Edwards
500 Internal Server Error	Nikki	England
The End of Pi	Andrew	Gardiner
Autophile	Dylan	Garity
What Lies Within	M	Gethins
Buddies	Emily	Grabham
Christmas Magic?	Peter	Greenwood
Deliverance	Lauren	Guastella
To Brighten a Dull Wing	Ruth	Guthrie
Hello Hell	Maurice	Haeems
The Making of Him	Alice	Jolly
Foxholes	Seán	Kenny
Everything Else Is Afterwards	Seán	Kenny
Hi-Ho The Derry-O	Suzanne	McCourt
Hitch	Emma	Neale
Baby Heart	Giles	Newington
The Outsiders	Treasa	O’Brien
Standard Model	Fergal	O’Byrne
Coccinella magnifica	A F	Packer
ALL IT TAKES	Pat	Pickavance
Release	Stephanie	Pollock
Banana Taffy	Chad	Poovey
Helter Skelter	Julie	Rea
Readmission	Josephine	Rowe
Last Act	Natalie	Southworth
They Come to Me Now and Then in The Dying	David	Strickland
Burgundy Ridges	Matt	Surface
Yoyo	Carsten	ten Brink
Endangered	Roger	Vickery
Roofers	Roger	Vickery
Stay and Hold	Joshua	Wagner
The Parts He Missed	Joshua	Wagner
Last Year’s Fires	Andrea	Watts
Dog	James	Wilson
DELOREAN	Judith	Wilson

 

 

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Long-list:

(alphabetical order)

There are 135 stories in the long-list. (There were 1,392 entries in total.)

 

Title	First Name	Last Name
Fur	Allegra	A Mullan
Hanna. With Two Ns.	Peter-Adrian	Altini
Before	Nancy	Antle
Borrowed Bones	Rita	Ariyoshi
Confinement	Karen	Ashe
Binoculars	Alex	Baines
Tamara Ivanovna Talks to Herself	Jana	Bakunina
THE GLASS EATER	Erika	Banerji
How to rescue a cat	liz	barnard
The Martyr’s Brother	Paul	Bassett Davies
The Jewelled Sea	Paul	Bassett Davies
Eli, 2021	Mona	Becker
The Mourners	Donald	Berk
Mobile	Maryanne	Berry
MIORBHAIL	Alfreda	Black
Lovely Stars	Hayley	Blair
Poetry for the Epilogue	Kevin	Broccoli
Vietnam	Letty	Butler
Chains Like the Sea	Michael	Carragher
The Approximate Distance in Light Years Between Us	Mike	Carson
Catch a ______ by his Toe	Stuart	Chapman
About the Cat	Ann	Collins
All Life’s Prizes	Jude	Cook
Hot Hex Summer	Laura	Cooper
Pomegranate	RAND RICHARDS	COOPER
The Names of those Lost	Craig	Cormick
Cailleach	Maureen	Cullen
Particles	Nina	Cullinane
Homeless Camping Jump	Annie	Dawid
Touch Pool	Brooke	Dunnell
Mending Wall	Mark	Edwards
Karma	Mark	Edwards
500 Internal Server Error	Nikki	England
Pivot	Jane	Finlayson
Souvenir	Thomasin	Finn
A Shrine for Justin	Mary	Fox
A Category of Kindness	Soma Mei Sheng	Frazier
How Many Feminists Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb?	Helena	Frith Powell
The End of Pi	Andrew	Gardiner
Autophile	Dylan	Garity
Story of a Book	Paulo	Garnsey
My Sweary Neighbour	CJ	Garrow
Badly Drawn Girl.	Ruth	Geldard
What Lies Within	M	Gethins
Buddies	Emily	Grabham
Christmas Magic?	Peter	Greenwood
Deliverance	Lauren	Guastella
To Brighten a Dull Wing	Ruth	Guthrie
Hello Hell	Maurice	Haeems
The Deer	Andrea	Harper
untitled	Sarah	Harte
King of the Roads	Aaron	Hennessy
Paulina	Pamela	Hensley
Shelley, naked	Brian	Hill
Banana Bread	Rachael	Hill
A Man Who Has Com Through	Sean	Hooks
The Old Snow Country	Mandy	Huggins
The Chef’s Suggestions	Roger	Jefferies
Someday Soon	Gregory	Jeffers
The Making of Him	Alice	Jolly
The Troop Leader	Brynne	Jones
The Bird Warden	Jupiter	Jones
Diamonds and Toads	Sara	Keating
Pupils	Tyler	Keevil
Foxholes	Seán	Kenny
Everything Else Is Afterwards	Seán	Kenny
Silence	Scott	Lambridis
Contrary Motion	Anna	Lawrence
Life in the Caged Jungle	BV	Lawson
Red Sun	Mary	Lewis
KILLING TIME IN ABERYSTWYTH	Emily	Macdonald
Absent Without Leave	Fiona J	Mackintosh
The English Opening	Camilla	Macpherson
Stella	Emma	Mather
The Democracy of Weather	Tracy	Maylath
The Weaver of Tales	Jillean	McClory
Halley’s Comet	Victor	McConnell
Hi-Ho The Derry-O	Suzanne	McCourt
The Unexpected Challenge	Patrick	McCusker
Epilimnion	Alison	McGuire
Breakfast Like a Pauper	Naci	Mehmet
Breakfast	Naci	Mehmet
The Exorcism	Gillian	Metheringham
Knot Wood	Michael	Miller
The Turn	Philip	Miller
Memento Mori	Pauline	Milner
5, 4, 3, 2, 1	Konrad	Muller
Rats, Stars etc.	David	Murray
Hitch	Emma	Neale
Baby Heart	Giles	Newington
The Outsiders	Treasa	O’Brien
Standard Model	Fergal	O’Byrne
Borneo	Leanne	Ogasawara
“Maroons”	Alexander	Ortega
Coccinella magnifica	A F	Packer
Where the Women Are	Susan	Peet
The Longhouse	Nicholas	Petty
Odds	Nicholas	Petty
ALL IT TAKES	Pat	Pickavance
Release	Stephanie	Pollock
Banana Taffy	Chad	Poovey
Skokie	Janet	Price
The Other Side	Norah	Prida Bay
Helter Skelter	Julie	Rea
She Went There for the Weekend	Hannah	Retallick
The Tender Hand of Faith	John	Rex
Dirty Chicken & Rice	Simon	Roberts
Pipeline	Alex	Rourke
Readmission	Josephine	Rowe
A Parcel of Rogues	Kerry	Ryan
The Thing Adored	Hanako	Senzoku
White Gloss and Sheen	Hanako	Senzoku
The Watch Case	Hanako	Senzoku
Waiting For The Big One	Catherine	Shorr
Buried	emma	Shtanichev
A Weighty Issue	susan	smith
Last Act	Natalie	Southworth
KILL ALL SHAREHOLDERS	Jon	Stapley
They Come to Me Now and Then in The Dying	David	Strickland
Burgundy Ridges	Matt	Surface
Complete strangers	John	Taylor
Yoyo	Carsten	ten Brink
Licked	Rosalind	Thomas
Endangered	Roger	Vickery
Roofers	Roger	Vickery
Stay and Hold	Joshua	Wagner
The Parts He Missed	Joshua	Wagner
Last Year’s Fires	Andrea	Watts
The Flatlands	Tracey	Weddle
The Invisible One	Pamela	Wills
Dog	James	Wilson
DELOREAN	Judith	Wilson
Concerto in F Flat Minor for Oboe and Flute	scott	winkler
The Worst Story	Mat	Woolfenden
The Lonely Daughter of Fabio Penitente	Anna	Zaranko

 

 

MORE ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY

The Maritime Hotel, (Bantry, West Cork, Ireland) hosted The Anthology launch on 11th July, during the West Cork Literary Festival. 15 of the 39 writers published in the Anthology made it to the launch to read an extract from their short story or memoir, or their entire flash story or poem.

 

 

A pre-launch get together of the writers and some of the Fish team the night before in Ma Murphy’s Bar, Bantry, was enjoyed by all.  It was a great opportunity to get to know the writers who attended, many of whom had travelled from abroad to be there. What a great bunch! Seán, from Ma Murphy’s Bar added to the occasion with his insights into world affairs. 

 

 

 

The launch was introduced by Clem Cairns (Fish Director) and Tina Pisco (Fish Editor). The audience was in for a treat. Each of the pieces read at the launch came alive. There is something magical about hearing authors read their own work, an extra quality, a spark, a flavour that you might miss when reading alone.

 

 

 

 

 

Helena Frith Powell reading from her short story, ‘The Japanese Gardener’ (2nd Prize)	Karen Stevens, reading from her short story ‘Among the Crows’ (3rd prize).
Geoff Lillis, reading from his short story, ‘Repossession’.	DB MacInnes reading from his short story, ‘The Gypsy Gambler’.
Partridge Boswell reading his flash story, ‘The Stone Cottage’ (1st prize).	Linda Nemec Foster reading her flash story ‘On the Other Side of the World’ (2nd prize).
Seamus Scanlon reading his flash story ‘Beauty Curse’.	Wally Suphap reading from his short memoir, ‘Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an Incident’ (1st prize).
David Ralph reading from his short memoir, ‘Two Bastards’ (3nd prize).	Diane Vonglis Parnell reading from her short memoir, ‘Blame the Milkman’.
Jaclyn Maria Fowler reading from her short memoir, ‘In the Summer Before Third Grade’.	Susan Shepherd reading her poem, ‘The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove’ (1st prize).
Katie Griffith reading her poem, ‘Retreat’ (3rd prize).	Doreena Jennings reading her poem, ‘Blue Jeans’.
Cynthia Snow reading her poem, ‘For Leonard’.

Maritime Hotel, Bantry, West Cork, Ireland
11th July at 6pm

All welcome!

This event is part of the week long West Cork Literary Festival which runs from Friday 8th until Saturday 16th July. There is a packed schedule of talks, readings, interviews and workshops.

Many of the authors published in the 2022 Anthology will be at the launch to read from their work. The Anthology is a wonderous mixture of texture, view point and style and the launch will be a great opportunity to sample some of the exciting new voices showcased here.

 

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

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Winners

Here are the 10 winners, as chosen by judge Billy Collins, to be published in the Fish Anthology 2022

The Anthology will  be launched as part of the West Cork Literary Festival, (The Maritime Hotel, Bantry, West Cork – Monday 11th July – 18.00.) All welcome!

The 10 winning poems will be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2022. 
1st prize: €1,000
2nd: a week in residence at Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat. 
3rd: €200

 

Comments on the winning poems are from Billy Collins (below), who we sincerely thank for lending his time and experience to judge the prize.

Congratulations to the ten winning poets, and also to those whose poems made the short-list of 65, and the long-list of 247. Total entry was 2,170. 

 

More about the 10 winning poets (link). 

The Ten Winners:

 

FIRST                                                                                                 

The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove 
by Susan Shepherd (SCOTLAND)

‘Short, but not as simple as it might appear, “The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove” is a poem in five balanced couplets that captures a moment where two experiences, occurring simultaneously, are folded together.  The situation is spelled out in the first line: “I’m face to face with a wildebeest and my daughter is on the phone.”  The title lets us know it’s a stuffed wildebeest in a gallery, but the daughter’s “hatred of men starting with her father” is quite real.  The poem toggles back and forth between the daughter’s loud torrent and the mother’s fixation with the beast, who began in Kenya and now appears shocked to find himself in Glasgow.  The phone call ends and so does the mother’s moment with the animal.  Nothing to do but leave the gallery to the larger scene of stressed families and gaudy rink lights.  And, then, to write this modest poem, which, like the wildebeest, is a means of steadying the self.’ – Billy Collins

 

SECOND

Love’s Latitudes
by Judy Crowe (California, USA)

‘Love’s Latitudes is a delightful, lively send-up of instructions from what turns out to be a very unreliable teacher of oil painting.  The four uneven stanzas, with long chatty lines, contain an imbalanced mix of the practical (“Lay out your fine brushes”) and the absurd (“Always paint the sides of the canvas” and getting the right color for “thimbleberries”). The level of playfulness rises with the discovery that the pitiable student will be painting over another painting and the final work will somehow be suggestive of love.  The reader cannot help enjoy being manipulated by the escalation of silliness climaxing in a most mysterious ending where the flowers called coral bells (titanium white) will actually begin to ring.  Only in poetry’. – Billy Collins

 

 

THIRD

Retreat
by Katie Griffiths (Surrey, England)

‘Retreat begins as a parody of one of those yoga/mindfulness getaways, which ordinarily would be an easy target were it not for the speaker’s interestingly jangled language and her remembrance of another retreat involving ascetic deprivations and self-flagellation. Or was that in a past life? she wonders.  In neatly enjambed tercets, the poem becomes stranger as it finds its way.  A favorite sentence is “Thank heavens this was August/ and not the springmelt or we’d have been a limblash/ down to Orgiva.” We’re somewhere in Spain, but we’re really in the hands of an eccentric guide for whom the stars “jigged and hornswaggled.”  But after her distorted journey, she is returned by poem’s end to almost normal.  Eliminating as her identity both Nefertiti and her military uncle, she becomes herself again: a “mother frazzled to the quick.”  A vivid imagination is at play here, and a fine frenzy is the result’. – Billy Collins

HONORARY MENTIONS (in no particular order):

 

Blue Jeans

by Doreena Jennings (Carlow, Ireland)

 

 

Gourds  

by Caroline Freeman (Mississippi, USA)

 

 

Invisible Sisterhood

by Julia Forster (Machynlleth, Wales)

 

 

Stickball Cemetery

by Joshua Sauvageau (Chicago, USA)

 

 

Tell me I’m Pretty

by Nicole Adabunu (Iowa, USA)

 

 

Perfect Dad

by Jonathan Greenhause (New Jersey, USA)

 

 

For Leonard

by Cynthia Snow (Massachusetts, USA)

 

 

 

A LITTLE ABOUT THE WINNERS

Susan Shepherd is a journalist from the Scottish border town of Coldstream, where she likes to neglect housework and watch otters in the Tweed. Her first pamphlet, Wood End (2019) was published by Shoestring Press and she won the Poets & Players “Re-emergence” prize in Dec 2020. She was reunited with her late birth mother in County Cork in 1998 at the age of 37 and rejoices in her Irish roots.

 

Judy Brackett Crowe lives in the foothills of the northern Sierra Nevada. She believes that the right words in the right places—in chalk or air or song or memory—are worth a thousand pictures. She believes in lilacs, Latin, children, raspberries, summer evenings, the red-shouldered hawk and the sandhill crane, the cottonwood and the Douglas Fir.. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies and in her chapbook Flat Water: Nebraska Poems. www.judybrackett.com

 

Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada (those winters!) in a family from Northern Ireland.  Author of the pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant (Live Canon 2019) and the collection The Attitudes (Nine Arches Press 2021) she came second in 2018’s National Poetry Competition.  Katie is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, Red Door Poets and also singer-songwriter in A Woman in Goggles – a band which, to date, has neither swum nor skied.

 

Doreena Jennings, member of the award winning Carlow Writer’s Co-op, travelled in 2016 to Chicago and in 2018 to Sweden, Wales and  around Ireland to perform her work. She has been published in the Blue Nib, in several anthologies and and is one of the international poets on the PoetryXhunger website. Recently one of her poems featured on KCLR radio. In April 2022 she was the featured poet in Saturday Independent New Irish Writing.

 

Caroline R. Freeman is a poet born and raised in Mississippi. After receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, she has enjoyed teaching writing classes at colleges and universities in Maryland, Tennessee, Texas and Mississippi. She and her husband, Will, are raising a beautiful baby girl, Erin, and a spirited four-year-old, Henry, in Hattiesburg where she aggressively gardens and fancies herself the family historian. 

 

Julia Forster is a novelist and author of non-fiction. She is the Co-Director of The Literary Consultancy’s Being A Writer and she also works as a freelance publicist for independent presses and literary festivals. Having recently completed a Diploma in Spiritual Development, she is training to become a coach, specialising in working with authors and poets. In summer 2023, she’s launching a writers’ retreat outside Machynlleth, mid-Wales, from a north American-style cabin that her husband has been building by hand from larch felled from a woodland opposite the garden. 

 

Joshua Sauvageau was born and reared on the unremarkable plains of rural North Dakota. He joined the US Navy at 20. For six years, he operated a nuclear reactor operator on an aircraft carrier, where, in his downtime, he scribbled poetry in the bilge and against bulkheads. At present, he is a 42-year-old classical music recording engineer in Chicago. He once visited the Corn Palace of Mitchell, South Dakota. 

 

Nicole Adabunu is a young writer interested in the kind of work that devastates. Currently, she is a first year MFA Poetry Candidate and Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets University Prize, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Poets.org, Writer’s Digest, and The Greensboro Review. She is an avid hater of dog Instagram accounts written in first person.

 

Jonathan Greenhause’s first poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms, won the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize and will be published by Meadowlark Books in the Fall, and his poems have appeared in Banshee, The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword Journal, and on The Poetry Society website.  Jonathan lives in the Statue of Liberty and has been voted “World’s #1 Dad” for 9 consecutive years but graciously declines to accept the prize money, preferring to toil in anonymity.

 

Cynthia Snow’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Peace Review, Plant-Human Quarterly, and elsewhere.  Slate Roof Press published Cindy’s chapbook, Small Ceremonies.  Her fascination with the 17th Century botanical artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian led to a manuscript of poems.  Cindy lives in Shelburne Falls and works at Greenfield Community College.  In addition to words and stories, she loves to dance, sing, and hike.  She likes challenges, especially flower arranging.  

 

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SHORT-LIST in alphabetical order. (65 poems. Total entry was 2,170) 

 

TITLE	FIRST NAME	LAST NAME
tell me i’m pretty	Nicole	Adabunu
Our Country	Vasiliki	Albedo
The Monosyllabic Suicide Note	John	Alter
Distance	Alison	Binney
The Last Train	Andy	Blackford
A few beers later	Peter	Borchers
Silent Movie	John	Claxton
Revolutions	Alan	Coombe
At Gullane Bents	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
The day you buy me a Mandarina Duck rose dawn wallet	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
Safe	A.M.	Cousins
Bone	A.M.	Cousins
Love’s Latitudes	Judy	Crowe
My Mother’s Alligator Pocketbook	Elizabeth	Edelglass
Roadrunner’s Crayon	Theodore	Eisenberg
From Claudia	David	Evans
I Didn’t Know My Father’s Father	Attracta	Fahy
Rear Window	Frank	Farrelly
Resurrection	Simon	Fitzwilliam Hall
Heirloom	Kate	Flannery
Flying north, a war story (revised)	Stacey	Forbes
Invisible Sisterhood	Julia	Forster
Gourds	Caroline	Freeman
My Dad Sent Me and I Got Raped	Bill	Garten
Self Portrait as a Spermatozoon	Norman	Goodwin
The Perfect Dad	Jonathan	Greenhause
Everything, for a Reason	Jonathan	Greenhause
Retreat	Katie	Griffiths
A Trumpeter in Sumy Plays the Ukrainian National Anthem…	Matt	Hohner
At the Missouri Pacific Depot, Where, in 1931, You Holed Up for Three Days and Drank	Justin	Hunt
Blue Jeans	Doreena	Jennings
Railings	Doreena	Jennings
Secrets of the Gumbo	karla	k
To Abandon A Drowning Man	Madelyn	Kennebeck
An absence of bees	jane	killingbeck
Mr. Smith	Debbie	Knight
I say I want the world to look like poetry again	K. T.	Landon
The Steps of No. 93	Peter	Lindley
memo to Ginsberg	Paul	Lojeski
The Troubles	Seán	Martin
Sugar Cube	Aparna	Mitra
Wudu	Ariel	Mokdad
The Saoirse-Ronan-Poetry-Plan	Daniel	Myers
The Glam Night	Beatrice	Nori
I Have Kept Your Phone	Damen	O’Brien
Leaving Home at Eighteen	Eugene	O´Hare
All Saints Night	Patricia	Osborne
Sociology	Kelley	Pujol
ON THE EVE OF THE END OF THE WORLD	Liz	Purvis
Ghost Bicycle	Dilys	Rose
Stick ball cemetery	Joshua	Sauvageau
Love	Robin	Schwarz
Petrified	Diane	Sexton
The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove	Susan	Shepherd
Geography Lesson	Laura	Shore
Banana University	Di	Slaney
Petsamo	Morag	Smith
I wear my jewels like a prayer FFP22	Morag	Smith
For Leonard	Cynthia	Snow
On the Eve of the Piano Exam	Jean	Tuomey
Transformation	Jean	Tuomey
Old Man	Derval	Walsh
The Dogs of Mariupol Address their Former Owners	Arne	Weingart
The Invisible Orchestra	John	Williams
I was never subtle	Anna	Woodford

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LONG-LIST in alphabetical order. (247 poems. Total entry was 2,170)

tell me i’m pretty	Nicole	Adabunu
News from Agnieszka/ & Just Across the Border	Mara	Adamitz Scrupe
Invocation	George	Adams
Our Country	Vasiliki	Albedo
Love is an endurance sport	Simon	Alderwick
Mother	Kahle	Alford
the drama I missed	Nick	Allen
Selfie, Overheard, Afghanistan	John	Alter
The Monosyllabic Suicide Note	John	Alter
Dad	Nitsa	Anastasiades
Spring	Eliza	Anise
Immram	Philip	Armstrong
Sprung Song	John	Aske
The Other Ones	Ahana	Banerji
Coast	Tom	Barnett
The Boatman	Tom	Barnett
Distance	Alison	Binney
Dreams of Becoming a Local Vegetable	Shell	Bird
The Last Train	Andy	Blackford
The oral tradition	David	Bleiman
Ring	Gerry	Boland
Period	Laurie	Bolger
When the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon	Elizabeth	Boquet
A few beers later	Peter	Borchers
By the Book	Partridge	Boswell
The Return	Partridge	Boswell
Forced March	Paul	Bregazzi
Home	Nora	Brennan
Let there be poems	Liz	Byrne
Dinner For Two	Josh	Cake
Alien, 1980	Lorraine	Carey
Christmas Day 2021	Anne	Casey
Flow	Suzanne	Chick
Before Magnolia	John	Claxton
Silent Movie	John	Claxton
Halo	Colette	Colfer
The Glider	Alan	Coombe
Revolutions	Alan	Coombe
Lion Child	Raymond	Cooney
Delirium	Aaron	Corless
Keeping Mum	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
Julie Andrews’ Honesty	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
Snapshots from Beck Hide	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
At Gullane Bents	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
The day you buy me a Mandarina Duck rose dawn wallet	Alexandra	Corrin-Tachibana
Jewel of a Flower	Christine	Cote
Fairy Tales	Christine	Cote
Safe	A.M.	Cousins
Bone	A.M.	Cousins
The Prospect	Ellen	Cranitch
Love’s Latitudes	Judy	Crowe
A 1981 Sunny, Summer Vacation at Minehead Lighthouse, Ring Old Parish, County Waterford	Leo	Crowley
My Heart Races	Brittany	Curran
Tradition	Julian	Debreuil
Do You Mind?	Gerald	DiPego
Eyass	Hugh	Dunkerley
Fire Lanterns	Hugh	Dunkerley
Leftovers of Life	Michelle	Dupont
My Mother’s Alligator Pocketbook	Elizabeth	Edelglass
Roadrunner’s Crayon	Theodore	Eisenberg
What the angel says	Nadine	El-Enany
The women who wait	Jennie	Ensor
From Claudia	David	Evans
Moon Poem	Diane	Fahey
I Didn’t Know My Father’s Father	Attracta	Fahy
Regolith	Jessamyn	Fairfield
Rear Window	Frank	Farrelly
When My Mother Went into the Woods to Pick Mushrooms	Marian	Fielding
Resurrection	Simon	Fitzwilliam Hall
Heirloom	Kate	Flannery
Flying north, a war story (revised)	Stacey	Forbes
The Mentor of the Weak	Cy	Forrest
Some surprising things I learnt about breastfeeding	Julia	Forster
When I looked up an ex-boyfriend’s house on the internet	Julia	Forster
Invisible Sisterhood	Julia	Forster
Gourds	Caroline	Freeman
Me (Autistic and Unsociable) Dating a Neurotypical	Naoise	Gale
Disassociation	Sandra	Galton
Treecreeper	Josephine	Gardiner
After Midnight	Bill	Garten
I Lost	Bill	Garten
My Dad Sent Me and I Got Raped	Bill	Garten
The Night Before	Denise	Garvey
Aftermath	Denise	Garvey
Wind creatures scratch the surface of Europa	Brandi	George
Latched	Ellen	Girardeau
I Didn’t Know	Emma	Goldman-Sherman
Self Portrait as a Spermatozoon	Norman	Goodwin
Magnolias	George	Grace
Romantic Heroes	Zoe	Green
Because Writing More Poems Can Wait	Jonathan	Greenhause
The Perfect Dad	Jonathan	Greenhause
Everything, for a Reason	Jonathan	Greenhause
Retreat	Katie	Griffiths
In Heaven	Krishnanand	Guptar
Under and After All	Peter	Hankins
Such pure leaps   drenched grass      such a space to cross / s   le  e    p	Michele Pizarro	Harman
Everything is waiting for you	John	Heath
Deer Encounter	Mary	Hegarty
When I die	Alex	Heron
Sunflowers	Matt	Hohner
A Trumpeter in Sumy Plays the Ukrainian National Anthem…	Matt	Hohner
Midnight Walk	Laurie	Holding
A Cage in Search of a Bird (Revised Version)	Kathleen	Holliday
We Can’t Predict the Last Time	Lana	Holman
Poem in Praise of the Hinge	Kelly	Houle
Argentina	Justin	Hunt
As I Remember It, Mom	Justin	Hunt
How Time Works on the Southern Plains	Justin	Hunt
What We Didn’t Know	Justin	Hunt
At the Missouri Pacific Depot, Where, in 1931, You Holed Up for Three Days and Drank	Justin	Hunt
Goatskin	Rebecca	Irvin
Blue Jeans	Doreena	Jennings
Railings	Doreena	Jennings
Paris Moon	Dorothy	Judd
Secrets of the Gumbo	karla	k
Two is Company	Sreekanth	Kartha
To Abandon A Drowning Man	Madelyn	Kennebeck
Even Though He Is Not Here	James Allan	Kennedy
Pressure’s Down Boys	Peter Ualrig	KENNEDY
For Bob, on his 80th	Simon	Kensdale
An absence of bees	Jane	Killingbeck
Great Grandma Claire	Debbie	Knight
Mr. Smith	Debbie	Knight
Baldwin Beach	Mel	Konner
Frederica	Alison	Kreiss
To the Boys in My Niece’s Fourth-grade Class Who Question the Need for a Module on Poetry	K. T.	Landon
I say I want the world to look like poetry again	K. T.	Landon
The First Time, Reclaimed	Camille	Lebel
Not Knowing	Peter	Lindley
When Time Stood Still	Peter	Lindley
The Steps of No. 93	Peter	Lindley
Memo to Ginsberg	Paul	Lojeski
The Landing of Mars Perseverance	Angela	Long
Given the State of Thing	Sandra	Longley
The Raiment of Saints	Michael	Lyle
The Body	Michael	Lyle
Drift	Kilcoyne	Marian
Test Able, Bikini Atoll	Jonathan	Marks
No Word	Jonathan	Marks
Detachment	Jonathan	Marks
Sequelae to misplaced elbows & other violations	Shey	Marque
Irrecoverable Children	Shey	Marque
Insects Turning into Women	Sophia	Marshall
White Rhyme	Sophia	Marshall
One Time Me and the Dog Swam With the Dolphins They Let You Get So Close You Can Touch a Fin	Michael	Martin
The Troubles	Seán	Martin
What I Do	Wende	McCabe
Knollwood Way	Wende	McCabe
Jam	Aparna	Mitra
Sugar Cube	Aparna	Mitra
this is not a protest poem	Katrina	Moinet
Wudu	Ariel	Mokdad
there was a boy	Ewan	Monaghan
When I think about leaving this body behind–	Judith	Montgomery
Pentonvillanelle	Michaela	Morgan
Small Steps	Michaela	Morgan
Rewilding	Petrova	Mulvey
Icon of the Black Madonna	Elisabeth	Murawski
The Saoirse-Ronan-Poetry-Plan	Daniel	Myers
The Glam Night	Beatrice	Nori
Progress	Rachel	Norton
For Rain	Lani	O’ Hanlon
Natural Causes	Damen	O’Brien
Things Fall Apart	Damen	O’Brien
Night Photos	Damen	O’Brien
I Have Kept Your Phone	Damen	O’Brien
In among the ruins, love	Denise	O’Hagan
Look Away	Jamie	O’Halloran
A Week in Portugal	Eugene	O’Hare
Letter to my Mother, Five Years Sober	Eugene	O’Hare
Spigot (In Memory of Tommy O’Neill, 1936-2020)	Michael	O’Neill
Sacristy	Michael	O’Neill
Leaving Home at Eighteen	Eugene	O´Hare
Seventy-One Seconds	Rena	Ong
February, 2019; Lake Michigan	Chloe	Orrock
Hecate	Chloe	Orrock
All Saints Night	Patricia	Osborne
Time	Penny	Ouvry
Gold Dust	Penny	Ouvry
Fish Gods	Ben Rhys	Palmer
Way To Go, Dad	Tony	Peyser
Pussy Riot	John	Piggott
Minna	Helen	Pinoff
My Mother’s Parachute	Eleanor	Porter
Sociology	Kelley	Pujol
On the Eve of the End of the World	Liz	Purvis
Hyperemesis Gravidarum	Shahar	Raveh
My Brothers	Kathleen	Reddy
When Love Shows Its Hand	Jennifer	Reid
A Horse Departs	Bill	Richardson
Life	Sabel                   ­	Rideau
Like	Jacqui	Ritchie
The Word Jumper	Jacqui	Ritchie
Some New Kind of Endlessness	Richard	Robbins
Against Myth	Richard	Robbins
Ghost Bicycle	Dilys	Rose
Stick ball cemetery	Joshua	Sauvageau
Present Tense	Richard	Scarsbrook
Love	Robin	Schwarz
Last train home	James	Scoles
Unspoken	Louise	Scott
Million lights	Deepsha	Seeruthen
Petrified	Diane	Sexton
Stray Cats	Jacquelyn	Shah
The Parsonage	Penny	Sharman
Even in Pristina we get ready for winter	Lesley	Sharpe
The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove	Susan	Shepherd
Geography Lesson	Laura	Shore
This is You in the Sundance Catalogue	Shoshauna	Shy
Full Disclosure	Saudamini	Siegrist
My Soul and Me	Heather	Silverman
Banana University	Di	Slaney
Petsamo	Morag	Smith
I wear my jewels like a prayer FFP22	Morag	Smith
Dementia, or Drop the Quarter and Play?	Amy	Snodgrass
For Leonard	Cynthia	Snow
The Right To Age	Heather	Soderquist
This service includes all removable components	Emma	Storr
My Daughter Left Home Yesterday	Jasper	Swann
The Clocks have Changed	Mary	Tate
On the Eve of the Piano Exam	Jean	Tuomey
Transformation	Jean	Tuomey
A Visit to the Chinese Visa Application Centre, The Hague	Alice	Twemlow
My Old Subaru Outback	Jesse	Vasquez
Watermark	Gerd	Wagner
Actor	rob	wallis
Actor	Rob	Wallis
Then	Derval	Walsh
Old Man	Derval	Walsh
In the Woods the Mosses Speak to the Trees	DOLORES	WALSHE
The Dogs of Mariupol Address their Former Owners	Arne	Weingart
Owen’s Confession	John	Williams
Waka	John	Williams
The Invisible Orchestra	John	Williams
This Body, Not Another	Brad	Winters
Cancer Man	Amaury	Wonderling
Vimto	Amaury	Wonderling
I was never subtle	Anna	Woodford
There Once Was A Girl	Mariam	Yacoob

 

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

On behalf of all of us at Fish, we congratulate the 10 winners who made it to the Anthology, and to those writers who made the long and short-lists, well done too. Thank you to Qian Julie Wang, for the time and enthusiasm that she put into selecting the winners.

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The 10 Winners:

Selected by Qian Julie Wang.

 

FIRST

Thirteen Ways of Interrogating An Incident:
by Wally Suphap (USA)

This is masterful in craft, content, exploration, and style.
Qian Julie Wang

 

SECOND

Saddo: by Sheena Wilkinson (N. Ireland)

I felt your words in my bones … exquisitely crafted …
Qian Julie Wang

 

THIRD

Two Bastards: by David Ralph  (Ireland)

… you brought James back to life with your gift … keep writing.
Qian Julie Wang

 

HONORARY MENTIONS

 

For Chantal Akerman: by  Francesca Humphreys (UK)

Beautifully meditative … powerful … 
Qian Julie Wang

 

Blame the Milkman: by Diane Parnell (USA)

You had me from the opening: “We descend like fleas.” … truly magical.
Qian Julie Wang

 

Forgetting: by Elizabeth Whyatt (UK)

… insights into the body, trauma, and childhood …
Qian Julie Wang

 

In the Summer Before Third Grade: by Jaclyn Fowler (USA)

… brought Terri to life … I love the structure and craft of your piece.
Qian Julie Wang

 

A Cold Night in January: by Jupiter Jones (Wales)

(Stephanie Colburn´s memoir ´Milkweed´ was withdrawn and A Cold Night in January by Jupiter Jones takes its place.)

 

The Mole: by Ruth Rosengarten (Israel/UK)

… an exquisite piece.
Qian Julie Wang

 

Ten Stages of Reproduction: by Beverly Orth (USA)

… an intimate, honest portrait of pregnancy and motherhood … deployed perfectly. I can’t wait to see what else you write.
Qian Julie Wang

 

A little about the winners:

Wally Suphap was born to Thai-Chinese parents in Bangkok, moved to Los Angeles for K-12, begrudgingly worked as a corporate lawyer in New York and Hong Kong, and now lives on the border of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. An award-winning queer rights advocate whose activism work was profiled in The Guardian, Yahoo, and The Financial Times, Wally is a Lenfest Fellow and Teaching Fellow at Columbia’s MFA writing program and founding managing editor of The Plentitudes. 
Twitter: @WSuphap       IG: @WSuphap

 

Sheena Wilkinson has won many awards for her novels and short stories. Described in The Irish Times in 2015 as ‘one of our foremost writers for young people’, She has recently decided to try her hand at writing the truth instead of making stuff up, and this is her first published memoir piece. Sheena lives near Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland and when she’s not writing she’s usually dog-walking or singing, sometimes both at once.  

 

David Ralph writes fiction and non-fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in Dublin Review, New Irish Writing, Southword, Litro, and elsewhere. He is the 2021 recipient of the Words Ireland National Mentoring award for Dublin City Libraries. He lives in Dublin. 

 

Francesca Humphreys was born and raised in London and trained as a singer and actor. This year, she is completing a Masters in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her writing, she examines the scope of her appetites, the role that hunger has played in shaping her identity and the effects of what she calls ‘inherited immigrant syndrome’. When not writing, Francesca teaches high-octane indoor cycling classes.

 

Diane Vonglis Parnell grew up on a remote farm in Western New York with nine siblings. She has spent most of her adult life on the Central Coast of California. Diane serves as a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) volunteer for abused children in her community and lives a minimalist’s life in a 250 square foot cottage. Reading, writing and red wine are her favorite things.

 

Anna Whyatt is a writer, sculptor and dramaturg, her international and national cultural regeneration work has contributed to award -winning projects such as Tate Modern, the UK Film Council and Chelsea Flower Show. Her fiction and non- fiction has been shortlisted several times for international and national literary awards. She is currently working on a political mystery based on true events 1935-45 and a Kurt Weill ballet linked to the experiences of refugees. Her sculpture has been shown in UK, US and Poland. 

 

Jaclyn Maria Fowler is a storyteller at heart, coming from a long line of raconteurs and wanderers who trace their lineage back to the west coast of Ireland. She, too, travels to write and writes to travel, following in the footsteps of her ancestors. To pay for her obsessions, she works as Chair of the English Department at APUS. She is the author of “It is Myself that I Remake” and “No One Radiates Love Alone.”

 

Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the two-time winner of the Colm Tóibín International Prize, and her stories have been published by Aesthetica, Brittle Star, Fish, Scottish Arts, and Parthian. Her first novella-in-flash, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker was published by Ad Hoc Fiction and her second, Lovelace Flats by Reflex Press.  jupiter-jones@outlook.com  @jupiterjonz 

 

Ruth Rosengarten is a writer and artist who thinks the word collage describes her work in both areas. She is the only urban Jew in a certain village in Cambridgeshire where she does not commune with nature.  She has published extensively in the fields of art history and art criticism, before turning, in lockdown, to memoir writing. Her book Second Chance: My Life in Things will be published by Open Book later this year.

 

Beverly J. Orth is a reformed attorney with two degrees unrelated to the world of creative writing. She attends writing and literature classes at Portland State University, an institution that has twice refused to admit her to its MFA program. Yet, she remains undaunted by its rejection. Her work has appeared in precisely five literary journals. She lives in Portland, Oregon (U.S.), with her four sewing machines, three typewriters, one husband, and no pets.

 

 

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SHORT-LIST (36, in alphabetical order. There were 859 entries)

Title	FIRST NAME	SURNAME
Teeth	Morgan	Barbour
Nemea	L S	Beveridge
Milkweed	Stephanie	Colburn
Will There Be Enough Love In The Bank?	Tamsin	Cottis
134 Days	Phil	Cummins
Making A Glass Of Water	Eamon	Doggett
Life under water: A hearing loss journey	Rye	Dreyer
Bungalow People	Thea	Elmsley
All the Bright Stars	Sally	Fox
One Year the Pond	James	Friel
Romantic Landscape	Amy	Glynn
Where The Dust Lies (A Memoir)	Melinda	Goodman
A Welly Boot of Vodka	Mat	Greenfield
All That’s Left Behind	Anya	Hastwell
The State I’m In	Phyllis	Hollenbeck
Knifepoint	Anne m	Jones
A Cold Night in January	Jupiter	Jones
Time Present	Simon	Korner
Complete All Forms	Kathleen	Langstroth
Varifocals	Miki	Lentin
More Than Nineteen Thousand Doorways	Steven	Lewis
NOT KNOWING	Peter	Lindley
sic transit gloria mundi	Robert	Maxwell
On the March from Selma to Montgomery	Suzanne	McConnell
The Woods	Kerry	McNamara
Collision	Lindsay	Nicholson
Born Again	Bruce	Powell
Two Bastards	David	Ralph
Two Towels and A Cardboard Box	Cheryl	Reggio
The Mole: A Story in 62 Sestudes	Ruth	Rosengarten
The Ward	Nicole	Scobie
A Short Stay in Paradise	Michelle	Scorziello
Waiting Rooms	Kay	Smith
All American	Kate	Vieira
Blurry Vision 2020	Dorothy	Walton
Miss Brodie’s Girls	Lynnda	Wardle

 

 

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LONG-LIST (115. In Alphabetical Order. There were 859 entries)

TITLE	FIRST NAME	SURNAME
Harvests	Mara	Adamitz Scrupe
Ghosts	Sara	Atwood
Teeth	Morgan	Barbour
Physio	Paul	Bassett Davies
The Lifting of Abu Simbel	Julian	Beecroft
The Strange Legacy of a Diminutive Ghost	Anneke	Bender
Watching The Boats Come In	Susan	Bennett
Nemea	L S	Beveridge
Quack Quack	Shell	Bird
Sidney and the Primroses	Mary	Black
Rookie Teacher in a Red Dress	Wendy	Breckon
10 Under 70	Jim	Brennan
Milkweed	Stephanie	Colburn
The Veil	Samantha	Colicchio
Will There Be Enough Love In The Bank?	Tamsin	Cottis
Getting to Like the Germans	Jenny	Cozens
134 Days	Phil	Cummins
Man From Atlantis	Phil	Cummins
Icarus	Phil	Cummins
Mrs Alleman.	Isanna	Curwen
Between Two Piers	David	Danbury
Making A Glass Of Water	Eamon	Doggett
Life under water: A hearing loss journey	Rye	Dreyer
Bungalow People	Thea	Elmsley
The Merry Widow´s Club	Sandi	Fikuart
Labor’s Great Reporter	Jean	Fleming
Conduct: Unsatisfactory	Amelia	Fletcher
In the Summer Before Third Grade	Jaclyn	Fowler
All the Bright Stars	Sally	Fox
One Year the Pond	James	Friel
All Thumbs	Jack	Garvey
Romantic Landscape	Amy	Glynn
Last Night With the Light On	Rebecca	Godina
Where The Dust Lies (A Memoir)	Melinda	Goodman
Losing it	Liz	Granirer
Scorpio Versus Leo	Colton	Green
A Welly Boot of Vodka	Mat	Greenfield
Madagascar Memories	Jill	Hadfield
The Unseen	Stephen	Haines
Our Language	Holli	Harms
Do Not Tell a Soul	Catherine	Hartnett
All the Beautiful Houses	Maggie	Harris
All That’s Left Behind	Anya	Hastwell
Chameleon	Sylvia	Hayashi
A Muse at Arm’s Length	Louis	Hemmings
Salvaging Sweetness, a Memoir – an extract.	Esther	Hoad
The State I’m In	Phyllis	Hollenbeck
Knifepoint	Anne M	Jones
A Cold Night in January	Jupiter	Jones
Waking Tommy	Caitriona	Kelly
This Old Caged Bird Can Still Sing	Bridgett	Kendall
Uncommon Threads	Carmen	Kew
Time Present	Simon	Korner
Escape	Laura	Kyle
Complete All Forms	Kathleen	Langstroth
Title	First Name	Last Name
Varifocals	Miki	Lentin
For Chantel Ackerman	Francesca	Leonie
More Than Nineteen Thousand Doorways	Steven	Lewis
NOT KNOWING	Peter	Lindley
A White Plaster Cat	Paul	Marion
When the Band Broke Up	Debra	Marquart
sic transit gloria mundi	Robert	Maxwell
Athalee	Robert	Maxwell
The Dust That is Made Up of Her	Tracy	Maylath
On the March from Selma to Montgomery	Suzanne	McConnell
Psychics!	Alan	McCormick
Perihelion	Paul	McGranaghan
The Woods	Kerry	McNamara
For Every Bear That Ever There Was	Geoffrey	Mead
Purgatory Party	Natalie	Michaels
On anaphylaxis	Barbara	Mogerley
Dear Diary	Molly	Mogren Katt
Tadpole from the Epic Spawning	Marilyn	Moriarty
@3ftinpm	Barbara	Mossberg
Collision	Lindsay	Nicholson
ALP 650	Helen	O’Neill
The Ten Stages of Reproduction	Beverly	Orth
Ambush	James	Page
Why She Cried	Larry	Pankey
Blame the Milkman	Diane	Parnell
Give me a child until he is seven ..	Carl	Parsons
Ask Me How It Works: frequently asked questions about my open marriage	Deepa	Paul
In the restaurant of the Athenée Palace	Lilian	Pizzichini
Born Again	Bruce	Powell
Two Bastards	David	Ralph
My Mother’s Secrets	Cheryl	Reed
Two Towels and A Cardboard Box	Cheryl	Reggio
The Ghost	Emma	Rennison
Ringing of the Bell	Marc	Revere
The Mole: A Story in 62 Sestudes	Ruth	Rosengarten
The Other Side of the Tracks in 1971	Gerald	Ryan
My August	Peter	Samis
The Ward	Nicole	Scobie
A Short Stay in Paradise	Michelle	Scorziello
My Little Yza-Baby Story	Yza	Shady
Waiting Rooms	Kay	Smith
A Suitable Dress	Maxine	Smitheram
Lost Language	Ann	Spence
The Murder Plot	Charity	Starrett
There are moments which cry out to be fulfilled	Nina	Stochniol
Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an Incident	Wally	Suphap
Heart in Two Worlds	Chris	Thomson
All American	Kate	Vieira
All-American	Kate	Vieira
The Longest Day of the Year	Kate	Vieira
Blurry Vision 2020	Dorothy	Walton
Miss Brodie’s Girls	Lynnda	Wardle
Forgetting	Elizabeth	Whyatt
Saddo	Sheena	Wilkinson

 

 

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

 

From all of us at Fish, Congratulations to the writers whose Flash Stories were short or long-listed, and in particular to the 10 winners.

 

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Winners

Here are the 10 winning Flash Fiction Stories, as chosen by Tracey Slaughter, to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2022.

Comments on the flash stories are from Tracey Slaughter, who we sincerely thank for her time and expertise. 

 

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FIRST PLACE

The Stone Cottage:  by Partridge Boswell

Lyrical pull and enveloping atmosphere distinguished this piece from the first reading, drawing
me into its arresting sensory focus. While understated in terms of narrative action, the dramatic energies of its stonework setting sung, instilling each detail with emotional depth. Its textured, sense-rich approach to sound made its rhythmic sentences and close-range images layered, evocative and rewarding to re-read.

 

SECOND PLACE

On the Other Side of the World: by Linda Nemec Foster

What attracted me to this piece was how it utilized the dynamics of flash to vibrant structural effect, laying frames of scenic detail cleverly alongside each other to compose a lyric collage of glimpses. What struck me was its skill in capturing brief instants of foreign experience, through an enticing but contained series of images which it left to resonate compellingly.

 

THIRD PLACE

Millstone:  by Z Aaron Young

A dense, disturbing narrative-drive set this piece apart, drawing the reader ever deeper into the meshes of its drama, through to its intensely clever twist. It leads us through the turns of this darkly compelling plot through contained use of dialogue and encounter, making striking use of flash’s minimalism to deliver a honed and high-impact story.

 

 

SEVEN HONORABLE MENTIONS (In no particular order)

 

Crabwalk: by John Walshe

What I found compelling about this piece was its rhythmic energies and attention to sentence tempo and tension to evoke character. Its evocative beat and cleverly timed repetitions delivered a vivid impression of the narrator, keeping the reader ‘jumping big steps’ with its child speaker, and were also skillfully linked to the overall story arc and its dynamic core image-pattern.

 

Firelight:  by Kathryn Henion

The strength of this piece is in its lively mobilizing of setting detail in the service of storytelling. It places us in a vivid slice of landscape through crisp and evocative imagery, and involves us atmospherically in the character’s key childhood glimpse of adult life.

 

Beauty Curse:  by Seamus Scanlon

This piece stood out for its dynamic tone, making skilled use of dialogue and voice to grip the reader’s attention in its edgy narrative. It also allowed this strong vocal focus to drive an innovative form and movement, generating original narrative energy.

 

Kabul, August 2021:  by Marie Altzinger

Making use of sliding frames, this piece juxtaposed two points of view on a central crisis, effectively inhabiting different female angles and voices to political ends. It used this form powerfully but with tight control, letting the explosive off-screen drama arise through subtly selected detail.

 

Taking Revenge on Gustav Klimt:  (or The Paintbrush that isn’t a Paintbrush)  by David Lewis

Taking on an effective and tonally-alive point of view, this piece dissects a slice of artist’s model’s life with wry, cutting amusement at the sexual politics of image-making. Sharp, clever, economical and tongue-in-cheek.

 

A Mother Knows:  by Russell Reader

The economy of this piece worked powerfully to control strong emotion and to cover a long history in brief vocalized details. Spoken tension connects us effectively with character, subtly revealing a moving subtext beneath the minimal and controlled narration, approaching a heavy topic through bare contained voice.

 

While the Planet Still Remains:  by Fiona J Mackintosh

Immersive second-person narration and lyric rhythm at the sentence level were at the heart of this piece’s impact. It took on a vast and weighty subject, containing it effectively through sustained focus and a personal approach, building a clever analogy into its ending.

 

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A LITTLE ABOUT THE WINNERS:

 

Partridge Boswell is a stay-at-home rover, father of seven, and author of the Grolier Award-winning collection Some Far Country. When not hitchhiking or freighthopping, his bindlestiff poems have recently found homes in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword and The Moth. Co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival, he teaches at Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters in Montreal and troubadours widely with the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, whose debut release Last Night in America is available on Thunder Ridge Records. Please say hello when you see him busking on Grafton Street.

 

Linda Nemec Foster is a poet and writer, currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan (USA). She is the granddaughter of immigrants from southern Poland who settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Many of her relatives and friends still live in Poland (some of them near the Ukraine border) and she has visited them and that part of the world many times. The author of 12 collections of poetry (e.g. The Blue Divide, 2021 and The Lake Michigan Mermaid, 2018), Foster was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids from 2003-2005.

 

Z. Aaron Young is an MFA candidate in the NYU Low-Residency program and considers himself a fiction writer and spare-time philosopher. His writing has appeared in various folders across his laptop and has been read by tens of people. His hobbies are extremely easy to list and he very much enjoys music. When he’s not sleeping, he can be found more or less awake.

 

J.P. Walshe lives in Malahide, Co. Dublin and works in libraries.  When not surrounded by books he can be found on the sofa trying to forget about them.  After starting but then writing nothing for eight years he’s taken up where he left off and finds it a much more productive way to spend insomnia.  He once rode a bike cab in San Diego and taught English while pretending to know grammar in Barcelona.”

 

Kathryn Henion’s fiction has appeared in over twenty journals, including Beloit Fiction Journal, Saranac Review, Natural Bridge, and Green Mountains Review. She earned a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University, where she was editor of the biannual literary magazine Harpur Palate. Currently she serves as fiction editor for the online journal of art and literature, Anomaly, and lives, works, and writes in Ithaca, NY. www.kathrynhenion.com

 

When Seamus Scanlon won the Fish Flash Fiction Prize with The Long Wet Grass (2011) he thought he had arrived (in West Cork). When the story became a one act play (2014) he thought he had arrived (on Broadway).  When the story became a film (2015) he thought he had arrived (in Hollywood). When the play was translated into Japanese and staged in Tokyo (2018) he thought he had arrived (in the East). Will the Beauty Curse (2022) finally lift his arrival curse? Stay tuned www.seamusscanlon.com

 

Marie Altzinger was born in Luxembourg, and moved to Ireland at the age of six. Discouraged by a schoolteacher obsessed with the descriptive style of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Marie gave up creative writing for a quarter of a century. Thankfully she eventually saw the error of her ways, and now has two huge suitcases stuffed with PTCs (Pieces to Consider). Marie lives in Dundrum, Dublin, with her wonderful husband, fabulous daughter, and super dog. 

 

David X. Lewis has written journalism for Reuters, speeches on AIDS for WHO, and documents for a Geneva organisation that sacked him. He now focuses on creative writing from Ferney-Voltaire, France. The opening of his third (unpublished) novel was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021, when he also won the Bangor 40-word competition. In 2022 he will be published by Bath Flash Fiction and (twice) in Sticks and Stones, an Oxford anthology of “flash greats”. 

 

Fiona J. Mackintosh (www.fionajmackintosh.com) is the Scottish-American author of a flash collection, The Yet Unknowing World published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She has won the Fish, Bath, Reflex, and Flash 500 Awards, and her short stories have been listed in several cool competitions in the UK and Ireland. She lives just outside Washington D.C., but she’s thankful that her imagination can carry her across continents and time, both during lockdowns and in happier times.      

 

Russell Reader lives in Keele, England, with his husband and two sons. He won first prize in the New Writer Magazine’s Prose and Poetry Awards and has been published by Litro, InkTears, Flash, Grist, and Bath Flash Fiction. One day he would like to write a story that isn’t sad and grim.

 

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Short-list:

(alphabetical order)

 

There are 41 flash stories in the short-list. There were 948 entries in total.

Title	First Name	Last Name
Kabul, August 2021	Marie	Altzinger
The day you chipped a tooth and touched a nerve	Lesley	Bungay
Labels	Letty	Butler
Fishes I Have Known	Ric	Carter
Brez	Ava	Dan-Gur
Karma Chameleon	Anne	Eyries
Echolalia	Elizabeth	Field
On the Other Side of the World	Linda	Nemec Foster
The Door Opens	Geoffrey	Graves
Firelight	Kathryn	Henion
Lost Treasure	Maria	Jackson
Herring	Sarah	Kartalia
Cleft by the lines of cowards	Nelum	Kaur
Blood Brothers	Jim	King
Koel	Alfie	Lee
Flash Fiction	Alfie	Lee
A Human Jellyfish Goes Missing	David	Lewis
Taking Revenge on August Klimt   (or The Paintbrush that isn’t a Paintbrush)	David	Lewis
A Becket Tale: 1972	Finbar	Lillis
Rocket-ship set-up guide	Kik	Lodge
While the Planet Still Remains	Fiona J	Mackintosh
“Going, Going, Gone!”	Michael	Mahoney
The Prodigal’s Brother	Patrick	McCann
A Brush with Circe	Lauren	McNamara
Never Let Me Go	Geoffrey	Mead
GHOSTS	Catherine	Neville
Posted	Brigita	Orel
A Mother Knows	Russell	Reader
Falling Woman	Hannah	Retallick
For a Time, I	Hannah	Retallick
Meltdown	Nicholas	Ruddock
Bed Time	Yvonne	Sampson
The Sister as a Fox	Shannon	Savvas
Deciduous Trees	Adrian	Scanlan
The Twins	Seamus	Scanlon
Beauty Curse	Seamus	Scanlon
The Kiss	Jo	Skinner
Coppélia Doll Variation	Michaela	Tamma
The Proposal, Lyme Regis, 1936	Ken	Wilson
Satellite of love	Alison	Woodhouse
Millstone	Z. Aaron	Young

 

 

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Long-list 

(alphabetical order)

There are 72 flash stories in the long-list. There were 948 entries in total.

 

Title	First Name	Last Name
Kabul, August 2021	Marie	Altzinger
SISTERS	Carrie	Beckwith
The Stone Cottage	Partridge	Boswell
A Cry Beneath The Leaves	Michael P	Bowles
White is the Color of Decay	Matthew	Brandon
Things I Would Do if I Was a Disgraced Soviet Scientist, Living in Exile on the Riviera	Kati	Bumbera
The day you chipped a tooth and touched a nerve	Lesley	Bungay
Labels	Letty	Butler
Fishes I Have Known	Ric	Carter
All That Remains	Charlene	Cason
Man Up	Yvonne	Clarke
Brez	Ava	Dan-Gur
Trying to Write a Haiku	Rosamund	Davies
Driving Home	Christina	Eagles
On taking Macy’s Kittens to the Sawmill	Henry	Edwards
Caravan	Susan	Elsley
Subject: Humanity 2022-4022	Stephen	Enciso
Mountain Air Folly	Tanya	Esnault
Karma Chameleon	Anne	Eyries
Warp Factor	Tom	Farrell
Echolalia	Elizabeth	Field
Leaving hospital with a suitcase	Nick	Fordham
On the Other Side of the World	Linda	Nemec Foster
Burhan Now or Never	Nancy	Freund
Aliens	John	Fullerton
Keys	Laura	Geringer Bass
In the Light	Cicely	Gill
Odette at Tea-Time	Heather Lynne	Goddard
The Door Opens	Geoffrey	Graves
An Imitation	Leonie	Gregson
Last Wave	Michael	Hainsworth
Sticks and Stones	Daniel	Harwood
Turning Back Time	Hannah	Hawthorne
Firelight	Kathryn	Henion
It’s a Living	Tova	Hope-Liel
Lost Treasure	Maria	Jackson
Fishtail or Why I Can’t Recommend a Birthing Pool	Jupiter	Jones
Was this an Act of God	Roger	Jones
Herring	Sarah	Kartalia
Cleft by the lines of cowards	Nelum	Kaur
Blood Brothers	Jim	King
This Isn’t Working Anymore	Keith	Law
1-800-KARS-4-KIDS	jeffrey	lazar
Colour of Night	Roland	Leach
Koel	Alfie	Lee
Flash Fiction	Alfie	Lee
The Dragon’s Inn	Alfie	Lee
Jack	Alfie	Lee
Gilbert	Alfie	Lee
Commonwealth	Alfie	Lee
A Human Jellyfish Goes Missing	David	Lewis
Taking Revenge on August Klimt (or The Paintbrush that isn’t a Paintbrush)	David	Lewis
A Becket Tale: 1972	Finbar	Lillis
Rocket-ship set-up guide	Kik	Lodge
Broken	Laurie	Mackie
While the Planet Still Remains	Fiona J	Mackintosh
Going, Going, Gone!	Michael	Mahoney
Suspicion	Robert	McBrearty
The Prodigal’s Brother	Patrick	McCann
Mantelpiece	Alan	McCormick
Fearing	Paul	McKeogh
A Brush with Circe	Lauren	McNamara
Never Let Me Go	Geoffrey	Mead
Nouvelle Cuisine	Geoffrey	Mead
Electric Cold	Jane	Messer
Beyond	Hailey	Millhollen
The Baptism	Alison	Milner
Cornered	Katrina	Moinet
GHOSTS	Catherine	Neville
Ed Vedder	Dominic	Nunan
How to take Prizewinning Photos	Tom	O’Brien
The Mummies of Guanajuato	Pamolu	Oldham
Versions of Him	Helen	O’Neill
Posted	Brigita	Orel
Disassociation	Carolyn	Peck
The closest I came to having sex after twelve years of marriage to a man with anhedonia [cont.]	Kathryn	Phelan
A Mother Knows	Russell	Reader
Turkey Legs	James	Reid
Falling Woman	Hannah	Retallick
For a Time, I	Hannah	Retallick
The Fly Trap by the Window Adjacent to My House	Hannah	Retallick
Meltdown	Nicholas	Ruddock
No Future in Being a Postman	Michael	Salander
Bed Time	Yvonne	Sampson
The Sister as a Fox	Shannon	Savvas
Deciduous Trees	Adrian	Scanlan
The Twins	Seamus	Scanlon
Beauty Curse	Seamus	Scanlon
Man of Letters	Wilma	Scharrer
Cider on Your Lips	Kim	Schroeder
King Cat	Lucy	Shuttleworth
Way Out West	John	Simms
The Kiss	Jo	Skinner
Eventuality	Jonathan	Splittgerber
Underpaid	Jamie	Stacey
The Spirit of Things	Nora	Studholme
Coppélia Doll Variation	Michaela	Tamma
Some creatures trapped in ice	Hilary	Taylor
Dog Nose	Brendan	Thomas
The Movements	Cole	Tucci
Never too late	Melanie	Veenstra
Crabwalk	John	Walshe
Shedding Skin	Nicole	Watt
Savannah Animals Fun For Kids	Susan	Wigmore
The Proposal, Lyme Regis, 1936	Ken	Wilson
The electric is-ness of life	Michele	Wong
Satellite of love	Alison	Woodhouse
Snowfall	Amy	Wright
Millstone	Z. Aaron	Young
You Can Only Jump Forward	Glen	Zehr

 

A little about the winners:

 

Shannon Savas is New Zealander by birth, a nurse by profession. She divides her heart and life between Cyprus, England and New Zealand. A nomad since childhood, Shannon wonders still where she belongs and who she is. She won Reflex Fiction (2017), Cuirt New Writing Prize (2019), Flash500. Pushcart nominated. An also ran on shortlists, longlists; published online and in print. www.shannonsavvas.com/ A hobby photographer who looks for the perfection in imperfections. Instagram.com/shannonsavvas

 

Helena Frith Powell is a half Swedish, half Italian journalist and writer who has lived in Sweden, France, England, and the Middle East. Among her works are the memoir Ciao Bella (named in The Sunday Times books of the year) and Two Lipsticks and a Lover, a best-seller about finding your inner Frenchwoman. Helena recently completed a Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge and is now working on a novel about Virginia Woolf’s relationship with the short story writer Katherine Mansfield.

 

Karen Stevens was brought up on Hayling Island in Hampshire.  After many years of meaningless employment, she found herself working in a sand quarry in Gibraltar, dodging rocks hurled by deviant monkeys and de-rusting machinery.  The experience told her it might be a good idea to start writing fiction.  She now lives back on the South Coast, having opted for a safer kind of quarrying, teaching creative writing in West Sussex.  

 

Geoff Lillis is a cybersecurity expert who had a poem published when he was fifteen. He then stopped writing for longer than he is willing to admit. His interest was rekindled while adapting to a hand injury: the need to relearn how to type freed him once more to explore creativity through the written word. He writes now about intersections of finance, technology, and people, generally with a twist, sometimes with success, and always one handed.

 

Anna Round grew up in Belfast and Glasgow, and studied English at Oxford University before moving to London. She now lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North East of England, where she works in research. Her short stories have won several awards and she is currently working on a novel. When not writing she enjoys running very long distances, snowboarding, and the music of Beethoven and Bruce Springsteen.

 

DB MacInnes lives on bogland on the Isle-of-Skye. His people came there in the 1860s after being ‘cleared’ from more fertile parts to make way for sheep. It’s said there was a foot race for the best crofts and if that’s true his ancestors were no athletes. Nevertheless, as a writer he’s used to hopeless odds, so he continues to plant trees in acidic soil and when seeking consolation, reaches for his uilleann pipes.

 

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, A Russian-Armenian, moved to the U.S. in 1995, after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Writing in English, her second language, Kristina published fifty stories and received nine Pushcart nominations. She’s the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, long-listed for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was published by Ballantine Books in March of 2022.

 

Martha Catherine Brenckle teaches writing at the University of Central Florida. Because her life leans towards the chaotic, before writing on her laptop she catches her thoughts on post-it notes until she has a collection. In 2000, she won the Florida United Arts Award for Poetry. Her first novel, Street Angel (2006) was a Finalist for Fence Magazine’s 2007 GLBT Novel Award. In 2019, Finishing Line Press Hard Letters and Folded Wings.

 

Abi Curtis is Prof. of Creative Writing at York St John University. She is the author of two poetry collections from Salt Modern Poets series, a climate change novel, Water & Glass (Cloud Lodge, 2017) and has written for BBC Radio 3 . She enjoys collaborating with artists, musicians and scientists and has contributed to work exploring subjects from ancient church frescoes to giant squid. She has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham award. She writes on animals, motherhood and the uncanny. She lives in York with her husband and two sons. 

 

 

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Short-list:

(alphabetical order) There are 57 stories on the short-list. (There were 1,350 entries in total).

Title	First Name	Last Name
A Retirement Plan	Edward	Barnfield
Durrencrow	Paul	Bassett Davies
The Kissing Bridge	Martin	Blayney
Death Wish	John	Brannen
Still Life with Coyote	Martha	Brenkle
Vermin, 1977	Sinclair	Buckstaff, Jr.
The Longings of Fionnoula.	Gerardine	Burke
Fade	Jonathan	Clarke
Predictions	Abi	Curtis
Stand-Off	Gerald	DiPego
Following	Gerald	DiPego
The Evil Orange Penguin	Ryan	Dunne
the heart tastes best	Judyth	Emanuel
The Japanese Gardener	Helena	Frith Powell
Folie a Deux	Richard	Hooton
I’m Not a Bad Person	Holly	Hoyt
Mutual Aid	Kimberly	Grier
Mirrored	Roger	Jefferies
Roll on the Tropical Fun	Jessica	Jones
Who by War	Maria	Kaplun
Us and Them	Ian	Lee
The Russian for Love	Sarah Line	Letellier
The Search for Slate	Jack	Lethbridge
The Laugh	Ralph	Levinson
The History of Things	Nathan	Long
The Gypsy Gambler	Duncan	MacInnes
To See Only Sky	Rory	Maizels
Acquired Daughter	Michael	Males
Prime Real Estate	Louise	Mangos
Trash at 13	Maureen	McCoy
The Elusive Taste of Xetery	Catharine	Mee
De Valera and the Armadilllo	Conor	Montague
Burma Valley	Katie	Moore
How We Got Here	Jeremy	Morton
Crow Wood	Rachel	Newsome
Last of the Cricketers	Dominic	Nunan
Mr Pilot	Feargal	Ó Dubhghaill
Odds	Nicholas	Petty
In Darien	James	Prier
The Keeper of Lost Things	James	Prier
Death, Elevation	Endria	Richardson
The Mole: A Story in 62 Sestudes	Ruth	Rosengarten
Walking The Dog	Martin	Ross
Skyline	Anna	Round
Swim	Anna	Round
The Days	Shannon	Savvas
The Fall	Henry	Shawdon
Bitter Water	Pnina	Shinebourne
Lemon	Penny	Simpson
Eva	Alan	Sincic
Smoke	Barbara	Stowe
Goose	David	Strickland
A Stranger Passes	IAN	TALLACH
Young Thief	Joe	Totten
The Captain and Mr Schinkel	Tab	Troughton
Glacial	Heidi	Williamson
No Use	Michelle	Wright

 

 

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Long-list:

(alphabetical order)

There are 141 stories in the long-list. (There were 1,350 entries in total.)

 

Title	First Name	Last Name
Christmas at Castle Rock	Peter-Adrian	Altini
Red and Blue	Lucy	Apps
The speed of dark	Anne	Aylor
The Leak	Jana	Bakunina
The Moons of Mars	Vrinda	Baliga
A Retirement Plan	Edward	Barnfield
Durrencrow	Paul	Bassett Davies
Skinny Kids	Jackson	Benzinger
The Kissing Bridge	Martin	Blayney
Seven Letters	Courtney	Brach
Death Wish	John	Brannen
Still Life with Coyote	Martha	Brenkle
Half a Girl	Michelle	Brock
Vermin, 1977	Sinclair	Buckstaff, Jr.
Sweets	John	Budden
Train Spotting	Lesley	Bungay
The Longings of Fionnoula.	Gerardine	Burke
Size of a Planet	Kate	Carne
Future	Stephen	Cashmore
Uncanny As Other Bodies	Gavin	Caterina
Fade	Jonathan	Clarke
Daily Life in Ancient Rome	Julia	Clayton
Gideon’s Grave	Jude	Cook
Out Damn’d Spot	Trevor	Copp
Take Heart	Nat	Cotterill
Predictions	Abi	Curtis
Up the down stairs	Mary	de Sousa
Blue Monday	Jennifer	DeLeskie
“Stand-Off”	Gerald	DiPego
“Following”	Gerald	DiPego
The Evil Orange Penguin	Ryan	Dunne
Four Walls	Naomi	Elster
the heart tastes best	Judyth	Emanuel
With Relative Ease	Rachel	Ephraim
Look at the Rainbow	Tom	Finnigan
The Japanese Gardener	Helena	Frith Powell
Where Our Eyes Forget	Kelly	Fulk
Boxes	Yoshino	Funaki
Dead on Time	Sharif	Gemie
Colours of a Foreign Land	Stephanie	Ginger
The Visitor	Kristina	Gorcheva-Newberry
Mutual Aid	Kimberly	Grier
Sacred	Finola	Griffin
Guirnaldas de Margaritas	Thomas	Grindrod
The Heartwood is the Hardest Part	Katie	Hale
I’ve Got God on Speed Dial	Eaton	Hamilton
Come the Fox	Sean	Hannaway
Cleopatra Would’ve Liked  Dunkin Donuts	Holli	Harms
LIGHTS	JJ	Harrington
The Bow-Wow Palooza Interfaith Blessing at Temple Israel	Jacqueline P	Haskell
Camellias	Vivian	Hassan-Lambert
Women Who Wine	Emma	Hazen
The Lake	Robin Christopher	Heaney
Midway	Mahito	Henderson
Two Horsewomen of Acapulco	Malcolm	Heyhoe
Soul Cholesterol	Joseph	Hirsch
Folie a Deux	Richard	Hooton
I’m Not a Bad Person	Holly	Hoyt
Mirrored	Roger	Jefferies
Hobgoblin	Solomon	Jessie
Night Shift Pie	Kierra	Johnson
Roll on the Tropical Fun	Jessica	Jones
The Melting Pot	Dean	Just
The Two Souls of Daniel Blue	Jayne	Kaplan
Who by War	Maria	Kaplun
An Ocean Deep	Kara	King
The Sharp Princess	Bronia	Kita
Bound to Happen	Sydney	Lea
Us and Them	Ian	Lee
Why Did The Drones Stop Singing?	Becky	Leeson
Fault Line	Jordan	Leigh
Hypergraphia	Robert	Lentell
The Russian for Love	Sarah Line	Letellier
The Search for Slate	Jack	Lethbridge
The Laugh	Ralph	Levinson
Repossession	Geoff	Lillis
Emilies	Nathan	Long
The History of Things	Nathan	Long
The Gypsy Gambler	Duncan	MacInnes
To See Only Sky	Rory	Maizels
Acquired Daughter	Michael	Males
Prime Real Estate	Louise	Mangos
Beyond Mile 91	Foday	Mannah
Teach Your Daughter to Hate Herself	Tracy	Maylath
Trash at 13	Maureen	McCoy
The Elusive Taste of Xetery	Catharine	Mee
De Valera and the Armadillo	Conor	Montague
Stricken	Janet	Moore
Burma Valley	Katie	Moore
Figures in a Landscape	Anthony	Morgan
How We Got Here	Jeremy	Morton
Alice	Damien	Murphy
The Pool	Kevin	Murphy
Crow Wood	Rachel	Newsome
Last of the Cricketers	Dominic	Nunan
Mr Pilot	Feargal	Ó Dubhghaill
If you want hope you can damn well pay for it	Corrina	O’Beirne
Burnt	Denis	O’Sullivan
Penumbra	Angelina	Parrino
Odds	Nicholas	Petty
The Dinner Party	Sean	Phoenix
The Girl, the Owl, and the Sea	Dolores	Pinto
Fate	James	Prier
In Darien	James	Prier
The Keeper of Lost Things	James	Prier
Sorry For Your Loss	Clare	Reddaway
There was a small noise	Kieron	Rees
Death, Elevation	Endria	Richardson
Look at Her	Kaitlin	Roberts
The Mole: A Story in 62 Sestudes	Ruth	Rosengarten
Walking The Dog	Martin	Ross
Swim	Anna	Round
Skyline	Anna	Round
Entrenched	MARGARET	SANDS
The Days	Shannon	Savvas
The Awkward Ballad of Tarbet McQuade	James	Scoles
The Fall	Henry	Shawdon
Osteopathy	Gemma	Sheehan
Bitter Water	Pnina	Shinebourne
Lemon	Penny	Simpson
Breakers	Alan	Sincic
Eva	Alan	Sincic
The Dolls’ House	James	Skivington
Variation on the Ceremony of Innocence	Lorraine	Smith
Lice Busting	Sofi	Stambo
Among the Crows	Karen	Stevens
Smoke	Barbara	Stowe
Goose	David	Strickland
A Stranger Passes	IAN	TALLACH
Homogeneity	Ryan	Tan
Retrospective	Barbara	Tarrant
The Heart	Ruby	Todd
the adventures of cat	Ann	Tornkvist
Young Thief	Joe	Totten
The Captain and Mr Schinkel	Tab	Troughton
The Unravelling	Alice	Twemlow
A CRAVING FOR SWEETNESS	Maggie	Wadey
In the Shadow of St. Peter	John	Walshe
Sarah Sparrow : Surfer Dude	Andrew	Westgate
Indigo Shore	Elizabeth	Whyatt
Glacial	Heidi	Williamson
Slinky	Michelle	Wright
No Use	Michelle	Wright