We will not be running a short story competition in 2008.
2006/2007 Short Story Competition
The winner of our short story competition is Carolyn Kirk from Uppingham in Rutland with her story Adrift. There were four commended entries: Ginny Baily with George and the Goblin, John Bakewell with Josef's Sister, Chris Powell with The Russians are Drowning and Bead Roberts with Letters to Freddie Mercury. Many congratulations. There were 758 entries to the competition.
Funded by the Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts programme, the competition was judged by the award-winning novelist and short story writer Hilary Mantel. (Photo credit John Haynes.) You can read her judge's report below.
Hilary Mantel has published nine novels as well as a collection of short stories: Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003). Her latest novel, Behond Black (2005), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and a Commonwealth Writers Prize and won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award. She was appointed a CBE for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2006.
Shortlisted entries
A Whistle for Denny by Tom Greenwood
Letters to Freddie Mercury by Bead Roberts
My Life in a Nutshell by Susan Davis
Goebbels' House by Pauline Plummer
Albert and the Cat by Patricia Blalock
Some Birds Can't Fly by Monica Tracey
Seeing Red by Faith Barnes
Arranging Oranges by Anne Greer
Josef's Sister by John Bakewell
Alpha Male by Fiona Ritchie Walker
Adrift by Carolyn Kirk
The Russians are Drowning by Chris Powell
George and the Goblin by Ginny Baily
Great Balls of Fear by Joan Byrne
The Trial by Lynda Green
Howling Down Below by Sue Haigh
Walking Papers by Rosie Jackson
Note Perfect by Glyn Myerscough
How not to go to Mexico with a Married Glazier by Rosie Ford
We were all so blissfully happy by Fiona Bell Currie
Hilary Mantel's Report on the 2006/2007 Short Story Competition
I don't know why people say there are no new stories. Every story is new, because every story comes from a unique story-teller. Our top twenty stories were of high calibre, and each one came from an interesting voice with something to say. My chosen winner is Adrift by Carolyn Kirk from Uppingham in Rutland, a masterly, subtle and startlingly beautiful story, which stands repeated re-reading.
It takes on the great communal nightmare of our time, the small child who disappears from his mother's side, and it is full of suspense and a sense of a horror just withheld, just beyond our grasp. Despite the subject matter, the treatment is low-key, unsensational; nothing in it shouts for attention, and the mood it trails behind it is of sadness, mystery. The observation is intimate, the focus close: 'the dry-nailed toes that claw down as she bargains for fruit.' Point of view in this story is exquisitely managed. We are with the child, moment by moment; we are that little boy of three, but we are also the much older child, who works back from the diagram in the school textbook to sensory recall of the real seashore, of a single afternoon, a long and restless night. The immediacy is achieved by sensory precision - note the colours, the smells - but the sense of elapsed time, and of timelessness, the sense of the drift and pull of memory's tides, is created by the thoughtful sophistication of the mind through which the story is filtered to us. The incidents related are the kinds of events on which one ruminates through life, perhaps even into old age, trying to grasp each time a little more of their quality and meaning, each time defining and redefining the experience, trying to net its essence. 'Years off, the smell of incense, the scent of the resin of far distant trees will carry him back to this night.'
Once the situation is set up, once the child has drifted away from his mother, no reader will put this story down, and so the writer can afford to relax, almost digress: 'These shoes came from the shop in the High Street next to the café, the one that has the bear at the top of the stairs…' The diversion takes us into the boy's innocent wondering mind, and actually heightens the tension. The reader badly wants a fix on the man's intentions, but what the child can observe, and what he will remember, are irrelevant, incidental details; it is through them, through his immediate sense impressions, that he constructs his own reality. The man does not harm the child. Did he come across the child incidentally, take him on a whim, then not know what to do? Or - the grim thought arises - is he simply holding the child to pass him on to some one who will harm him? Has he a plan, or no plan? Is he lonely, pathetic, irresponsible, an unmeaning cause of panic and pain; or has the child been rescued just in time? We have no insight into his motive. Nor has the child. That is how it would be. Motive will be constructed later, by the adult world, but there will always be large areas of doubt. The memory will always be in jittery flux.
It is almost unnecessary to stress the formal, lyrical beauty of this prose, and the intricate rhythm and balance of the sentences; these yield themselves as immediate pleasures from the first paragraph. It is writerly - not a word I like very much, but here it is the correct word to use. This is not a story that could be told around a camp-fire. It can't be boiled down into an anecdote. It subdues the reader's attention to its way of telling, delicate and nuanced, confident and measured.
It was difficult to make a choice between the other stories, but there are a group of four I would like to commend, and here they are in no particular order. George and the Goblin by Ginny Baily from Exeter has more than a touch of Helen Simpson's wryness, capturing the wounded intelligence of the young narrator, her grasping at maturity, the blithe way the young have of creating damage around them then sailing through the wreckage. I brooded a lot on the last bleak sentence, then decided, or remembered, that yes, the world can seem like that at sixteen or so; those rattling carriages resonate back through the story and shake the reader's nerves.
Letters to Freddie Mercury by Bead Roberts from Thurcaston, Leics is a touching but not sentimental story, simply written and well-shaped, with the right amount of concrete and specific detail, so that we are very well able to imagine the texture of the character's lives. And it does an important and praiseworthy thing - it carries the reader's imagination beyond the confines of the text. What, we ask ourselves, will Marg arrange for Winston's next birthday?
I would have liked to stay longer with the characters of The Russians are Drowning by Chris Powell from Stanhope, Co Durham, perhaps meet them in a novel; I was intrigued by their situation and drawn by the author's lurking, dark, comic sense. The idea of her mother sending the unstrung and helpless Hannah a postcard of Beachy Head amused me more than I can say. Josef's Sister by John Bakewell from Droitwich, Worcs, was a brave attempt to tackle and dark and difficult subject, with some flashes of cinematic vividness, and writing throughout of a high quality. Is this perhaps a fragment of a longer work?
Among the other shortlisted stories were a number of well-judged and well-crafted glimpses: the deft and thought-provoking Walking Papers by Rosie Jackson, the wry, understated and intriguingly-titled How Not to Go To Mexico with a Married Glazier by Rosie Ford. Arranging Oranges by Anne Greer is immaculately written, mysterious and original; perhaps a little too mysterious was We Were All So Blissfully Happy by Fiona Bell Currie, which is full of images of a whiplash effectiveness, and phrases that go right to the heart. I was fascinated by this story, but it left me stranded; to be frank, I would have placed it higher if I was quite sure, after repeated reading, that some secret didn't lie in the changes of typeface. Great Balls of Fear by Joan Byrne offered an intriguing glimpse of lives colliding, and Alpha Male by Fiona Ritchie Walker is well-composed and thoughtful. Howling Down Below by Sue Haigh attracts the reader by its exotic topography and confident tone, but it needs more than the scope of a short story to make us understand the characters and their complex interactions.
None of our top twenty were without singular qualities of their own. Two things to watch, I think. It is quite possible to change point of view within a short story, but I think it happens too often in A Whistle for Denny by Tom Greenwood; each time it happens, the narrative loses energy. And think hard about your choice of tense. I am a great fan of the present tense, its energy and directness - at the moment I'm writing a whole book in it - but where the subject matter is as delicate as that of Goebbels' House by Pauline Plummer and the theme tends to retrospection, might the past tense, together with some kind of frame for the memories, allow for more nuance?
I enjoyed the stories immensely and wrote comments - mostly appreciative - all over them. But when I picked them up to shuffle them into some kind of order, I found that on my winner I had written nothing at all - its quiet authority was so persuasive that I had simply drawn next to the title a very large star.
Longisted entries
Money Matters
Do Cavemen Kiss?
The Importance of Sisters
Objects of Desire
Golden Retriever
Hair
Breaking the Ice
The Darras
We were all so blissfully happy
Black Angel
The Book Cupboard
How not to go to Mexico with a Married Glazier
Tan
Rope Trick
Walking Papers
Note Perfect
The Merry Bag Lady
Flappers Night
Howling Down Below
First at Last
Shame
The Trial
Black and Blue Men
Great Balls of Fear
Tea with the Princess
The Pleasure Seekers
Skin Deep
The Russians are Drowning
George and the Goblin
Pilgrim of the Sky
Ice Storm
Adrift
Madonna on Highway 101
Dust Shot
Alpha Male
A Very Small Angel
Josef's Sister
A Dry Death
Arranging Oranges
Hostage
Explosion
Retro Eggs
Seeing Red
Mrs Wetherby
The Man who loved Trees
Some Birds Can't Fly
Reversed Images
Beggars on the Beach
The Bracelet
Albert and the Cat
Survivors
Miracles do Happen
God's Dog
Glorious the Roses Bloom
The Gloaming
Goebbel's House
The Christening
The Garden
Looking Through You
The Exiles
My Life in a Nutshell
Letters to Freddie Mercury
Moville Light
Bad Dreams
The Sands of Time
Belay
The International Police
Memorial Service
The Girl in the Green Tee Shirt
Vi's Bananas
Earwig
Canis Familiaris
Time on my Hands
A Whistle for Denny
Our next short story competition will be launched in later in 2007.
You can dowload an entry form for the short story competition from the website or you can send an SAE to Blinking Eye Publishing, Short Story Competition, PO Box 175, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 9AW and we will post you a copy of the entry form and rules.
Click here to view the competition rules
How to enter
If you are an overseas entrant you can submit your competition entry online, and pay for your entry using your credit card. We regret that this facility is for overseas entrants ONLY. Your credit card company will deal with any necessary foreign currency conversions and bill you in your local currency.
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Page last updated: 15.01.2008
