The
best 2005 Historical Short Fiction Prize
This competition is now closed. Please visit Our Writing Contests page to view our latest and current competitions
For results of this competition go to Fish News
Summary - The Rules - Entry Fees - On-Line Entries - Postal Entries
Some pictures from the Launch Party for the Short Histories
Anthology 2006, All the King's Horses & Other Stories. If you would
like to buy a copy of the new Short Histories Anthology click on "All
the King's Horses"
Thank you to all the authors who came along, and a special thank you
to Michel Faber, one of our judges, and to Richard Lee from the Historical
Novel Society.
The History Prize winners:
Jo Campbell from London wins the First Prize of £2,000 plus publication as the title piece of the 2006 Short Histories Anthology with her story All The King’s Horses. Earlier this year, she came second in the Fish Short Story Prize with In The Desert
In second place is Hugo Kelly from Galway with his story Vanishing Point. He receives £250.
Third place was Phil Jell from London with Altarpiece. He receives £250.
The following seven have also been selected to appear in the Anthology and each will receive £250. They are listed in alphabetical order.
Judy Crozier (Victoria, S. Australia), Dreamed a Dream
Emma Darwin (London, England), Russian Tea
Clare Girvan (Exeter, England), Titian’s Rose
Sheila MacAvoy (Santa Barbara, USA),In The Valley of the Trinity
Imogen Robertson (London, England), The Monkey
Janette Walkinshaw (Dalry, UK), Refugees
Mary Woodward (St Albans, England), Russian Tea
Short List in alphabetical order.
We would like to thank all who entered. We at Fish had a wonderful time reading these often fascinating stories from diverse historical settings.
Lane Ashfeldt Dancing on Canvey
Mary Bonner Comfort Station
Gerardine Burke Deathly Silence
Jo Campbell All The King's Horses
Stephan Clark Vladimir's Mustache
Judy Crozier Dreamed a Dream
Emma Darwin Russian Tea
Carys Davies The Visitors
Christina Davis Saltwater
Waverley Fitzgerald Lady Marabout's Surrender
Solveig Foss Under Strange Stars
Clare Girvan Titian's Rose
David Hart Hens, Pigs, Straw & Body of Christ
Phil Jell Altarpiece
Hugo Kelly Vanishing Point
Sheila MacAvoy In the Valley of the Trinity
Fred McGavran Two Cures for Phantom Limb
Anna Milford Grindcobbe's Groat
Lucy Moore Ruthless Arithmetic
Marc Phillips Pyjama Squid
Jean Pickering A Quiet Life
Imogen Robertson The Monkey
Richard Scott The Islet
Christine Stanton The Devil and the River
Claire Thomas The Solid Five Of It
Robin Tilley A Foreign Country
Michele Torrey Idle Tears
Marja Ulpovaara-Greenlees Sticks and Stones
Janet Walkinshaw Refugees
Mary Woodward Russian Tea
Foreword to the Short Histories Anthology 2006
The following is the Foreword written by Michel Faber for the Short Histories Anthology 2006. It is an essay on the art of writing historical fiction, as well as a generous and thoughtful insight into the stories included in the Anthology. The book was launched in London on 5 March 2006. For details go to Fish News.
"Most writers can identify the pitfalls
of historical fiction wonderfully well. They can give you a list of
temptations that must be resisted; indeed, some give lectures and produce
manuals on the subject. Then, blind to their own advice, they fall head-first
into the pit themselves.
The problem is, it’s not easy to write fiction set in bygone ages
without doing all the things that good narrative sense tells us not
to. Those who learn too much from the past are condemned to repeat it.
That is, those who have carefully studied, eg, 17th century Flemish
butchers as “background research” for their story are often
condemned to tell us every little thing they’ve learned about
butchery, the Flemings, and the 17th century in general. They may flatter
themselves that this is precisely what they’ve avoided. They may
assure us that what they show in the narrative is only the tip of the
iceberg, and that the vast bulk of their research is actually submerged,
unstated, implicit. They may speak disparagingly of those other historical
writers who just can’t help pointing out period details twenty
times per page. But then you start reading, and before you know it,
you are inundated with information that the characters themselves would
never remark upon. Illiterate peasants mention, in the course of unlikely
conversations, what year it is and which king is on the throne. Pampered
ladies who, in real life, would have regarded their servants the way
we regard the electrical cord behind the fridge, feel honour-bound to
describe everything their maids are doing. Everyone seems bizarrely
compelled to analyse every aspect of their daily lives: the composition
of their clothing, the contents of their food, the manufacture of virtually
every object they touch. And, of course, every sentence spoken by everyone
is stuffed with archaisms. Even Babylonian slaves and Vikings orate
like pompous Victorians.
When writers of historical fiction do this, it’s not because they’ve
gone mad. It’s because they fear – quite reasonably –
that if they don’t keep reminding you of the past, you will get
lazy and see the present. The present is our default setting. It is
what we picture in the absence of specific information to the contrary.
“A young man kissed his girlfriend in the street”: we see
a modern man, a modern girl, a modern street, even a modern manner of
kissing. Ancientness needs to be added, and kept topped up.
What, then, is the secret of a good historical story – a story
that keeps us securely inside a bygone world, while not annoying us
with constant reminders of where we’re supposed to be? How can
an author recreate a past era in such a way that it isn’t a theme
park?
For answers, I invite you to turn to ‘All The King’s Horses’,
Jo Campbell’s winning story in the Short Histories Prize. In transporting
us to a famous late-medieval battle and keeping us there, it does as
much as it needs to, never more, never less. The beginning of the first
line, “We came over the downs at dusk on the third day”,
establishes a great deal in eleven simple words. The triple alliteration
is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon poetry, planting a subliminal suggestion
of where we are in time. The use of “we” alerts us to the
fact that this tale will convey the experience of more people than just
an individual. The down-to-earth language (ten of the eleven words are
monosyllables) signals that these are common folk. “On the third
day” alludes to two previous days which we’ll never know
about, because life moves on and the narrator is disinclined to waste
time reminiscing. As the sentence opens up to acknowledge “the
straggling lines of men coming from all directions to join in one long
column”, we join the throng. We don’t know what’s
going on and why we’re here, but then, neither do many of the
soldiers. We’ve missed the start of this story, but if we fall
into step, we’re expected to catch on.
Having established the tone and the pace, Campbell recognises the reader’s
urgent need to see and hear the scene. “Around us on every side
were points of light where soldiers already had their fires, and below
us in the valley the flares of the shipyards and bonfires on the quays.
We could hear the ring of the shipwrights’ hammers and the shouts
of the sailors, and could see the masts, still bare, standing like saplings
against the evening sky. Beyond the masts stretched a great darkness,
with the evening star hanging above it. Now and then one or other of
the fires would burn up for an instant, and by its light we could see
the wrinkled surface of the water moving, moving.” Though only
four sentences, it is the longest description in the story, if we define
description as sensory scene-setting that is separate from character
and action. Yet there is nothing gratuitous about it. Each of its components
works very hard and very economically. It’s not just a vivid picture:
we can divine quite a lot about what is going on. And it makes sense
that our narrator would note all these things: he has never seen them
before.
Then someone speaks. “ “Is that the sea?” asked young
Wat; he had been longing to see it, but now he was almost too weary
to look. I had been carrying him on my shoulders for the last few miles.”
Here, so near to the outset of her story, Campbell manoeuvres the crucial
emotions and themes into place: the vulnerable boy, the narrator who
cares for him, the pitiless harshness of the endeavour, the ominous
sense that no amount of promised glory can justify the sacrifice. All
this, we absorb without fully knowing that we’ve taken it in.
The story has us. We already understand it instinctively, even though
we’ve barely entered its action.
I could write an in-depth analysis of what follows, every paragraph
of it, and thus compose an introduction longer than the story itself.
But the important thing to note, and to admire, is Campbell’s
sound instincts for what needs saying and what should be left unsaid.
Too often in historical fiction, characters seem aware of the momentousness
of the events they’re embroiled in. Real life is seldom like that.
People cope as best they can, living from minute to minute, performing
the small tasks they’re given, trying to get along with whoever
is closest. For many writers, in thrall to history books, the story
of this battle is the story of King Henry V. But in Jo Campbell’s
account, the king is never given a name, and the narrator hears of his
prowess only second-hand. The battle as we experience it is fought by
ordinary men – credible individuals whose ongoing concerns are
food, warmth, a comfortable place to sleep. The name of a nearby village
– Agincourt – is mentioned only once, in passing. That casual
mention has power precisely because no particular import is placed on
it.
Like all good stories about war, ‘All The King’s Horses’
applies to all wars. Matter-of-fact references to bowmen and falchions
remind us at judicious intervals of the medieval setting, but mainly
we are enveloped in the perennial realities of soldiers killing and
suffering as soldiers always do. This is an Iraq story as much as it
is an Agincourt one. It is a passionate indictment of the damage that
is done to men’s bodies, minds and morals by war, but there is
no polemical posturing in it. The narrator fights well, and does what
he must. At the end, he displays what he has become with no self-pity.
He can’t change things now: his pain is History.
Not all of the stories in this anthology are quite as finely judged
as ‘All The King’s Horses’. A few display their research
more than they need to. It’s no crime; some of the most celebrated,
and best-selling, historical novels ever written might have benefited
from more restraint. But each of the pieces here has been chosen for
its excellence. And they are a delightfully varied assortment, ranging
from deadpan simplicity to Baroque complication, raw horror to sophisticated
humour, slice of life to clever artifice. More than usual for an anthology,
this a compendium of all the different ways that fiction can succeed.
Take Imogen Robertson’s ‘The Monkey’. It could scarcely
be more different from ‘All The King’s Horses’ –
except in its quality. Reading this wicked little tale of a dastardly
Regency rake and his ill-fated purchase of a supernatural statuette,
we never lose our awareness of being manipulated by an artificial construct,
a neat device. Yet Robertson’s relish in screwing the plot tighter
and tighter against her protesting villain is obvious; ‘The Monkey’
is the equal of Roald Dahl’s best revenge tales. And, crucially,
Robertson takes care with her characterisation and her dialogue: the
plot may be rigid as a steel trap, but there is nothing mechanical about
the way these people behave and speak. This story has life. We suspend
our disbelief for the sheer thrill of it and, more importantly, we care.
One of the mainstays of historical fiction is filling in the gaps of
ill-documented lives of famous figures. Phil Jell slyly plays with this
narrative tradition in his vividly evocative ‘Altarpiece’.
A boy, known only as M, works as a lowly apprentice in the studio of
a Renaissance painter. To the mingled alarm and wonder of the master,
this “naive, gangling, simple” lad produces work of sublime
beauty, far superior to those of his employer. Thus, a murky drama of
encouragement and abuse begins. And, up until the thought-provoking
climax, the reader cannot help speculating on the true identity of the
young genius… Similar territory is explored by Clare Girvan in
‘Titian’s Rose’, in which the painter recalls the
infamous “Pietro Aretino, Tuscan, Venetian, writer, pornographer,
poet, dramatist, womaniser, blackmailer and flatterer, libel-monger
and man of letters, as unscrupulous as a stoat; my dearest friend.”
This tale of lust, love and cuckoldry is narrated in old age, when memories
of lost companionship and the nearness of death grant Titian the ability
to forgive long-ago betrayals. Forgiveness is often portrayed as an
act of grace, but Girvan shows us that it can be a matter of weary pragmatism,
a conservation of energy by a battered old soul.
Feminist scholars have pointed out that history is often “his”
story. Men have traditionally used the Law, social structures and business
practice to disempower women. Sheila MacAvoy and Janette Walkinshaw
explore these infuriating inequalities in contexts hundreds of years
apart. MacAvoy’s ‘In The Valley of the Trinity’ takes
us to the gold prospecting days of America’s wild west, where
prostitutes struggle to survive in a society which, for all its frontier
newness, is already rigged against them. This patiently crafted piece
has the feel of well-documented, reconstructed fact, enlivened by prose
of laconic eccentricity: “He had black eyes and whiskers the same.”
Walkinshaw’s ‘Refugees’ is set many centuries earlier,
when the Lord of Galloway dissolves a Dumfries priory and the casts
the nuns out into the harshness of the workaday world. Here, too –
as always when women are rendered destitute – prostitution enters
the picture, but Walkinshaw handles her characters’ plight with
tact and subtlety. Despite its medieval setting, this tale describes
an ever-recurring journey; the nuns are refugees not just from the house
of stone which they’d imagined “would stand forever”,
but also from their former value systems and ideas of selfhood. History,
as seen by most of the writers in this anthology, is not the building
up of a dream, but its dissolution; not a journey to an exotic clime,
but a diaspora from a disintegrating homeland.
Two pieces with the same title, ‘Russian Tea’, reached the
competition’s final selection. Emma Darwin’s story, retitled
‘A Glass Of Russian Tea’ for this anthology, is a bittersweet,
understated portrait of Russian Èmigres sleepwalking through
a new life in London after their enforced flight from post-Tsarist Russia.
Mikhael, groom to the aristocracy, dreams of noble St Petersburg horses
and, upon waking, takes the Piccadilly tube to the street pitch where
he sells pencils, shoe polish and dominoes. His fall from the ranks
of the exploiters to the exploited is sketched insightfully but without
judgement, and his melancholy encounter with a fellow lost soul has
just the right frisson of sexual tension. The opening lines of Mary
Woodward’s ‘Russian Tea’ eloquently encapsulate the
way memoir shades into fiction: “I remember the story. I think
I remember the story.” The narrator toys with the idea of phoning
her elderly aunt. After all, “she was there. It may have been
more than sixty years ago but she has a good memory. She just might
have the one or two details which will make it live. But then I pull
back. No. She could say it wasn’t like that. Not the way you heard.
It was this. It was so. And what she says
might not help.” What follows is a self-confessedly unreliable
but wholly convincing recreation of a World War II encounter, in which
the tea of the title symbolises human potentials not often seen in this
collection: generosity, honour, promises kept.
In tale after tale, the characters’ nobler instincts are undermined
by the cruelty of larger forces they’re caught up in. And nowhere
more so than in Hugo Kelly’s chilling tale of the Soviet gulag,
‘Vanishing Point’, in which Comrade Lesin from the Cultural-Educational
Institute is given the task of motivating malnourished prisoners to
dig a canal from the Baltic to the White Seas. Hiding his compassion
under a veneer of cold indifference, he manages to achieve results while
saving lives. But this is a world where any moral stand is fatally risky,
so it’s entirely appropriate that Kelly’s narrator keeps
us in the dark, maintaining an emotionally blank tone that only makes
the horror of the scenario more potent. Like Jo Campbell, Hugo Kelly
trusts his reader’s intelligence enough to let the story speak
for itself, without trying to pump up the pathos.
All the tales I’ve discussed up till now, different as they are,
are examples of conventional storytelling. Not so Judy Crozier’s
‘Dreamed A Dream’, a hallucinogenic vision of Lord Franklin’s
expedition trapped in ice floes. Essentially plotless, as befits the
marooned crew, it grips us solely with the poetry of its prose and the
atmosphere of long-simmered madness. The lonely grandeur of frozen seas,
and the unravelling morale of doomed sailors, have rarely inspired a
meditation as sustained as Crozier’s, a vision of glacial delirium,
full of remarkable lines like: “Our names are written with the
finest of nibs on a map drawn in ice-white and blue.”
This is just one of the ways a story can succeed. This anthology offers
ten. The past is here. Begin". - Michel Faber
Competition Summary
First Prize £2,000 plus publication as the title piece of the 2006 Short Histories Anthology. At least nine runners up will also be selected to appear in the Anthology and each will receive £250. The Short Histories Anthology will be published in early 2006. Closing date: 31 August 2005
The Historical Novel Society's definition of historical fiction is:
"To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).
We also consider the following styles of novel to be historical fiction for our purposes: alternate histories (e.g. Robert Harris' Fatherland ), pseudo-histories (eg. Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before ), time-slip novels (e.g. Barbara Erskine's Lady of Hay ), historical fantasies (eg. Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur trilogy) and multiple-time novels (e.g. Michael Cunningham's The Hours )".
Judges
Barbara Erskine is the author of the worldwide bestseller Lady of Hay and seven other novels. She has published three collections of short stories, each of which has sold over 100,000 copies: Encounters, Distant Voices and Sands of Time. Her latest novel Daughters of Fire, will be published in August 2006.
Michel Faber's first published work was a collection of short stories: Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories. He has won numerous prizes, and was the editor for Shorts: the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Collection. He is the author of internationally acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White and three other novels.
Rose Doyle is the author of eighteen novels. Her books celebrate Ireland and particularly Dublin, past and present. She has been described as a romantic novelist, but is also compared to Patricia Cornwell. Her latest historical novel is Gambling With Darkness, which the Irish Times described as 'popular fiction with acumen and a cheeky sense of justice'.
The Rules
- No entry form is needed
- The Award is open to writers
of any nationality writing in
English. There is no restriction
on period or style but the theme
must be historical.
Maximum 6,000 words. - The winning stories must be available for the anthology and, therefore, must not have been ublished previously.
- Copyright remains with the author.
- Notification of receipt of entry will normally be by email.
- The judges' verdict is final.
- No correspondence will be entered into once work has been submitted.
- Stories cannot be altered or changed after they have been entered.
Entry Fees
The cost of an On-line entry is fixed in Euro and the translation into your local currency will be done automatically by your credit card company according to the current exchange rate. The cost of Postal entry will be at a fixed rate in Euro, Pounds Sterling and US Dollars.
On-Line Entries
On-line entries will only be accepted if entered through our website. Please do not send stories as email attachments.
PLEASE ENSURE THE TITLE OF THE STORY APPEARS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST PAGE. PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR NAME ON THE STORY. YOUR STORY IS AUTOMATICALLY LINKED TO YOUR NAME.
| On-Line
Entry € |
|
| Per Entry | €27.50 |
| Critique (Optional) | €55.00 |
| 2006 Short Histories Anthology
(Optional) (Inc. p. & p.) |
€12.50 |
Postal Entries
Stories entered by post must be submitted with a minimum 12pt font and 1.5 spacing and printed on one side of the paper only. PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR NAME ON THE STORY. INCLUDE ALL CONTACT DETAILS ON A SEPARATE SHEET. Include e-mail address where possible. Stories will not be returned unless they are being critiqued. Include a cheque, made payable to ‘HNS Competitions‘ in your local currency to cover the cost of all your requirements. We also accept postal orders from Ireland and the UK.
| Postal
Entry £ |
Postal
Entry € |
Postal
Entry US$ |
|
| Per Entry | £22.50 | €30.00 | $35.00 |
| Critique (Optional) | £37.00 | €55.00 | $70.00 |
| 2006 Short Histories Anthology
(Optional) (inc p. & p.) |
£10.00 | €12.50 | $17.50 |
Postal entries should be sent to:
Historical Novel Society
PO BOX 63
EXETER
EX6 8WX.
If receipt of entry, notification of results, or response to any other enquiry is required other than by email, then send a Stamped Self-Addressed Envelope if posting from within the UK, or International Reply Coupons if writing from any other country.
Short Stories to read online
Read online some of the winning entries from previous Fish Anthologies. These are examples of the calibre that win the Fish Short Story Prize. Short Stories to read online
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