Category: News

You may know about FlashFlood, National Flash Fiction Day's curated online journal, but did you know that 2022 marks the fourth year of our Debut Flash Series?

Each year, we reserve slots for unpublished flash writers and, starting from 6:30 a.m. BST, we'll be publishing debut flash at half past the hour until midnight.  We've got over fifteen first flashes to celebrate today, and we're honoured and excited to be sharing them with you.

If you see 'Debut Flash' at the start of the title over at FlashFlood, it's an author's first published flash (and often their first published piece of any kind).

Happy Publication Day to all our debut authors, and to our former debut authors who have returned to publish with us again this year!

The Official NFFD 2022 Roadmap

And there's even more still....

We are thrilled to announce that today is publication day for Joanna Campbell’s wonderful novella-in-flash, Sybilla. Joanna won our Novella-in-Flash Award back in January with her historical novella set in bookshop next to the Wall in West Berlin.

Sybilla is now officially on sale at the NFFD Bookshop.

All of us at National Flash Fiction Day love this masterclass in the novella-in-flash form, but you don't have to take our word for it.  Here's what others had to say about Sybilla:

This novella-in-flash is a little gem … seamless storytelling.

— Sophie van Llewyn, Novella-in-Flash judge and author of Bottled Good

Beautifully written, atmospheric, and impeccably paced this is a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time. Campbell is a master of the form.

— Angela Readman, author of The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles

To celebrate, we've posted a couple videos of Joanna reading from Sybilla on our YouTube channel, and you can also read Jeanette Sheppard's Q&A with Joanna here.

Finally, to whet your appetite, we'll leave you with a little taste of what it's all about....

One August morning, the people of West Berlin wake to find their world divided. In the shadow of the Wall, Lara works in a bookshop where customers come and go, bringing regular news about loved ones trapped on the other side. Some strive to maintain connections via telephone and letters, while others plan a more desperate course of action. When a thunderstorm looms over the bookshop, a new customer takes shelter, bringing with him a story that Lara cannot ignore.

Sybilla is a story of separation, betrayal, and ultimately, the power of love.

National Flash Fiction Day 2022 is less than two weeks away and we're getting ready for another weekend of flashy fun.  We're super excited to launch our next National Flash Fiction Anthology on 18 June, but we thought we'd give you a sneak peak of the cover beforehand.

Huge thanks to our Artist-in-Residence Jeanette Sheppard and to anthology author Damhnait Monaghan whose flash title was chosen as this year's anthology title.

Without further ado, we're delighted to Introduce And We Lived Happily Ever After: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2022, edited by Karen Jones and Christopher Drew!

And We Lived Happily Ever After will be available to order very soon...watch this space!

Anita Goveas and Farhana Khalique are joining us again this year for another free workshop to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day 2022!

In this free, online workshop, Anita and Farhana will discuss how to add more depth into your flash fiction.

This event is free but spaces are limited and you must register in advance here.  For those who can't make it, we plan to publish a video of the workshop after the event.

Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from south-west London. Her writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2022, 100 Voices, This is Our Place, and more. She has been shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize and she is a former Word Factory Apprentice. Farhana is also a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and at Litro, and she is the editor of Desi Reads. Find Farhana @HanaKhalique and www.farhanakhalique.com

Anita Goveas is British-Asian and based in London. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s twitter zine, and she’s an editor for the Flash Flood. She is one of the teachers on Dahlia Publishing’s ‘A Brief Pause’ writer development programme and she taught a workshop at the ‘Stay at Home Lit Fest’. Her debut flash collection Families and Other Natural Disasters was published by Reflex Press in Sept 2020.

Find her at @coffeeandpaneer and https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com/

Looks like thunderstorms on the horizon...

It's that time of year again!  Submissions for FlashFlood, NFFD's online journal, will open for one week only, starting this Sunday.  The submission window is from 00:01 BST on 1 May to 23:59 BST on 7 May 2022. We're looking for pieces of up to 300 words on any topic, in any style.

Full submissions guidelines are available on the FlashFlood website and you can submit via our free-to-use submission manager, Duosuma. (You will need to register for a free account, but no subscription or fees are required.)

Please note that we have two separate submission calls, one for general submissions and one for our series of special slots reserved for new writers.

All accepted pieces will be published during the 2022 Flood on 18 June 2022, starting at 00:01 and lasting until 23:59 BST.  During the Flood, we'll publish a new flash at every five to ten minutes for 24 hours straight.

Our team is looking forward to reading your work....

After reading oodles of brilliant stories on the theme of FREEDOM, Karen Jones and Chris Drew have finalised their selections for the 2022 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and for the first-ever Editors' Choice Awards.

Below is the list of the 50 stories that will appear in this year's anthology, alongside the 2022 Microfiction Competition Winners.  We will be contacting everyone officially via email, so you should hear from us soon.  Congratulations to all the authors listed below!

Special congratulations to our two inaugural Editors' Choice Award Winners:

• Chris Drew chose Coins by Richard Barr
• Karen Jones chose Trout Prince by Rachel Gough

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

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

2022 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Line Up

• 29 Kumquats by Anne Summerfield
• A Day Out by Catherine Ogston
• A Parley at the Mouth of the Underworld by Nicole Ong
• A Sin to See Through Glass by Rosaleen Lynch
• All the Things You Know by Julia Smith
• Ancrene Wise by Cate Holness
• And We Lived Happily Ever After by Damhnait Monaghan
• Angel wings, boxed. As New by Jackie Morris
• Callisto by Angela Huskisson
• Coins by Richard Barr
• Come on Down by Amy Barnes
• Curriculum Vitae by Audrey Niven
• Don’t Look Back by Sherri Turner
• Down to Earth by Jude Higgins
• Dublin by Hannah Saal
• Free at Eighty by David Galef
• Freedom From and Freedom to by Edward Barnfield
• Freedom of Information by Jeanette Greaves
• Freedom of the Fells by Christine Sturt
• From the Rubble, 1945 by Emma Venables
• Good Luck Lenny by Sara Hills
• Herman’s Arrest by Linda Rowland-Buckley
• How to Hook a Heart by Judy Darley
• How to Make a Tote Bag and Heal Your Heart by Joan Taylor-Rowan
• Kite by Cathy Lennon
• Kolkata 1884 by Jonaki Ray
• Mine Was a Blessed Childhood by Marina Sofia
• My Love is Like a Fever etc. by Michela Esposito
• Neither yes nor no by Susy Churchill
• Our Sons Squirm as we Straighten Their Collars by Malina Douglas
• Packing Diamonds by Nancy Freund
• Peaches and Sour Apple by Rosie Garland
• Pursed Lips and Silences by S A Greene
• Radical Change by Hannah Smith
• Some Spark of Us by Peter Burns
• Temporal Dilation by Fay Brown
• The Butterfly Effect by Hannah Storm
• The Happy Baby by Cheryl Markosky
• The Innocence of Trees by Ruth Skrine
• The Leaving by Sarah Masters
• The Night Bus to Upstate by Roberta Beary
• The Rookery by Rachel Gough
• The visual merchandiser will Inspire with fresh takes on the hottest
• trends by Lucy Goldring
• Things the Adverts Said by Rebecca Field
• Three Lies by Annika Neukirch
• Too Close Too Low by Rachael Dunlop
• Trout Prince by Rachel Gough
• Untamed at Last by Gaynor Jones
• What We Did When We Knew It Was the End by Rachel Clarke
• X+Y=Something by Yasmina Din Madden
  

This is a reminder that the submission window for the 2022 National Flash Fiction Day Microfiction Competition and for the eleventh annual National Flash Fiction Day Anthology closes tomorrow, 15 February 2022, at 23:59 GMT.

These are two separate projects run by two separate teams with two separate submissions processes.  Here's a reminder of what each is all about....

NFFD Anthology

The theme of this year's National Flash Fiction Day Anthology is FREEDOM.

What do you think of when you think of freedom? Freedom from, freedom to do, freedom to be?

Does your mind go to prisons and zoos or to protest marches and politics or to leaving the office on a Friday, packing a bag and heading off on holiday? Or is it simply freedom of thought? Or is it George Michael belting out that classic? But maybe you have a very different view of freedom; go on, surprise us!

Feel free to interpret FREEDOM however you wish, in 500 words or fewer.  You do not need to include the word 'freedom' in your piece.

This year, we are thrilled to announce that we will be awarding two Editor's Choice Awards.  The 2022 editors, Karen Jones and Chris Drew will each select one piece from the accepted stories to receive a £50 prize.  Find out more about our editors here and keep an eye on our news feed for their interviews early next year.

You can read our full anthology submission guidelines here or go straight to our submission manager, Duosuma, where you can submit your work.

NFFD Microfiction Competition

We're reading flash of up to 100 words on any theme.

This year, we're offering:

• £150 for first place
• £100 for second place
• £50 for third place
• seven awards of £20 for highly commended pieces.

All winning and highly commended flash will be published both online and in the NFFD print anthology.

Our judges are that Christopher Allen, Joanna Campbell, Tracy Fells, and Damhnait Monaghan.  We'll be posting interviews with our judges in the new year, but in the meantime, you can read more about our panel here.

We are not able to consider simultaneous submissions this year, so please don't send us work that will be under consideration elsewhere before we announce the  results on or before 15 March 2022.  Our full competition guidelines and details of how to submit by email can be found here.

There's still time to send us something if you haven't already!  Our Anthology and Microfiction teams look forward to reading your work....