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Flash Fiction Short Story Competition!

Write a short story of up to 500 words and enter our competition.

Are you a keen writer? Take part in our Flash Fiction Competition!  The 3 winning entries will feature on Culture Leicestershire and be invited to attend a workshop run by a successful author!

How to Enter

All you need to do to enter is write a 500 word story including the sentence ‘the writing on the library wall’ and submit your entry to festivalofstories@leics.gov.uk by midnight on 30th September 2021.

Judges

Rebecca Burns

 

Rebecca Burns is a novelist and short-story writer. Her two short story collections, Catching the Barramundi and The Settling Earth, were longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the UK’s only award for short story collections. Published by Odyssey Books and Next Chapter, her novels The Bishop’s Girl and Beyond the Bay are available for purchase online. Quilaq, her latest book, was published by Next Chapter in July 2020. Her new book, about the summer two young girls spend with their grandparents, is set in the 1980s and will be published by Dahlia Books next year.

Farhana Shaikh

Farhana Shaikh is a writer and publisher born in Leicester. She is the editor of The Asian Writer and manages small independent press, Dahlia Publishing. In 2017, she won the inaugural Travelex / Penguin Next Great Travel Writer Competition and was long-listed for the 2018 Spread the Word Life Writing Prize. She can be found on Twitter talking about books and publishing @farhanashaikh

Mark Newman

 

Mark Newman is the author of the short story collection ‘My Fence is Electric and Other Stories’. He has been shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award, highly commended in the New Writer Prose & Poetry Awards and Bristol Prize longlisted. His work has won competitions judged by Alison MooreTania Hershman and David Gaffney and he was as a judge for the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize 2020.

Competition winners will be announced and notified by the end of September 2021. The judge’s decision will be final. We regret that no paper copies can be accepted and no entries will be returned.