SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2005

Words@Frome Festival

Click on the links below to download (PDF files) and read some of the winning entries from the 2005 short story competition.

Shards by Ann Newbegin (35kb)
Rabbits by John Ravenscroft (39kb)
Drifters by Sally Gander (65kb)

International prizes:
1st Prize - £300 - 'The Hat' By Claire Pickard (Oxford);
2nd Prize - £100 - 'For You, Hannah' by Alice Jolly (Brussels, Belgium);
3rd Prize - 'Passing Through' by Yvonne Jackson (North Yorkshire).

Highly commended:
'Drifters' by Sally Gander (Frome);
'Rabbits' by John Ravenscroft (Lincolnshire).

Local prizes:
'Drifters' by Sally Gander (Braithwaite Way, Frome);
'Shards' by Ann Newbegin (Bratton, Wiltshire);
'Learning The Ropes' by Rachel Bentham (Bristol).

Competition organiser Alison Clink said: “The winning story was about two sisters and how they cope with school. It was a brilliant story, well written, unusual and poignant.

“For You, Hannah is a menacing story about a man who picks up a female hitch-hiker. It keeps you gripped because you don’t know whether he going to attack her but in the end, the story is a warning about the dangers of women hitch-hiking alone.

“The response this year has been fantastic and the standard was high. We had more than 500 entries from around the world, including New York, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Belgium and of course, Frome.

“I am pleased that a local winner came in the top ten given that the entries were anonymously judged. Sally Gander’s story was about a man who has to say goodbye to his two sons.

“The competition has been so successful that I am looking forward to running the competition again next year,” she said.

Alice Jolly, who won second prize in main competition, travelled specially from Belgium to collect her prize.

Clink plans to send a selection of stories which she considers suitable for the female magazine market to Woman’s Weekly. Fifty entrants also paid for a professional critique of their work.

Winners and entrants will be welcome to read out their stories at a Prose Cafe in October. A selection of the winning stories will also be available to read online at www.wordswork.net/frome.

The prizes were presented by novelist and Man Booker Prize nominee Clare Morrall at the Frome Adult Learning Leisure centre on Sunday.

Morrall then talked about her extraordinary writing career. In the past 20 years, she has written five novels which have all been rejected by the major publishing houses.

Finally, she found a small publisher in her home town of Birmingham to take on her fifth novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour. Tindal Street Press submitted the novel to the Man Booker Prize competition in 2003 and it made the final shortlist of six.

Morrall read an extract from Astonishing Splashes of Colour and also treated the audience to the first public reading from her latest novel, Natural Flights of the Human Mind.

Clink said: “It was an inspiring talk because Clare never gave up writing. As soon as she stopped one novel, she started another and her determination paid off.”

After her talk, Morrall was presented with a copy of Frome Hundred by Janet Smith, one of the book’s contributors.