2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition First Place Plum Jam by Frances Gapper From our ladders we can see the plum-blue Malverns. The army’s bought up this harvest, still on the trees. We pickers are a crew: boy scouts, gypsies, PoWs, refugees,…
Ogdens
2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Second Place Ogdens by Gaynor Jones She scoops a clump of dirt-brown tobacco from the barrel and tries not to think of gunpowder. She pinches the right amount, packs it into the paper and tries…
Potato Masher
2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Third Place Potato Masher by Jake Sullins He’d found the stick grenade half-buried in mud in a bend of the Somme, in the days after Amiens, and he’d carried it clipped to his haversack through…
Casus Belli
2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Highly Commended Casus Belli by Melanie Haws John Haas went to war, aged twenty-three, a plumber’s helper, with a few dollars saved, and a picture of his Dresden-doll sweetheart he carried in his left breast-pocket; he…
Life After Death
2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Highly Commended Life After Death by Jennifer Moore After he died they put a stranger in his stitched-up shell, sewing his name into the fellow’s mud-mushed brain to keep it from slipping. They gave the…
WW1 Microfiction Competition Shortlist
We are delighted to announce our shortlist. It has been excruciatingly difficult to reach a decision, which is a testament to the strength and quality of the micro fictions we received. Each of our six judges read every story that…
WWI Microfiction Competition Update
Thank you to all the writers who submitted work for our first microfiction competition, and to everyone who spread the word about the contest! The number of entries, range of themes, and quality of writing was staggering, and we received…
BackStory: Five Questions with Ellen Goldstein
BackStory: Five Questions with Ellen Goldstein Author of Marie Curie’s Kitchen What inspired you to write this “Marie Curie’s Kitchen”? I read Barbara Goldsmith’s Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie (UK / US), and was struck by the…
Marie Curie’s Kitchen
Marie Curie’s Kitchen by Ellen Goldstein One pane of sunlight is all that is kept warm on the stove now that your father is gone, his bones light-shattered beneath a Paris carriage. After a while you stop trying to cook;…
BackStory: Five Questions with Amy Barnes
BackStory: Five Questions with Amy Barnes Author of The Garden Statue What inspired you to write ‘The Garden Statue’? I read an article on 18th century monks that lived in gardens as precursors to garden gnomes. But there was more…