Short Stories: Results 2017
Neel Mukherjee,
judge of the Fish Short Story Contest 2016/17
Here are the results of the 2016/17 Fish Short Story Contest, judged by Neel Mukherjee. Neel’s comments on each story are included. The eleven stories will be published in the 2017 Fish Anthology. It will be launched at the West Cork Literary Festival in July ’17.
First prize is €3,000 and a place at the short story workshop at the West Cork Literary Festival.
Second prize is €300 and a week in residence at Anam Cara Writer’s Retreat.
Third prize is €300.
There is a brief biography of each of the winning authors, below the results.
FIRST PRIZE: “Dead Souls” by Sean Lusk. (Dorset, UK.)
A bookish soul’s touristy whizz through Russian literary history that culminates in a fine, unexpected sense of existential dread. ‘Dead Souls’ has the magic surplus of meaning that characterises fine examples of the form.
SECOND PRIZE: “Black Toe” by Bron Burgess. (London, UK)
Deliciously depraved story about a strange, horrifying fetish, told as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
THIRD PRIZE: Neel has awarded third prize jointly to: –
“Undetermined” by Philippa Holloway (Lancs. UK)
and
“What Green Tastes Of” by Lindsay Fisher. (Glen Garth, Scotland)
Impossible to choose between the two. The first is a story of an unusual problem, with an ending that is at once funny and full of foreboding, the second a tight, intense, synaesthetic story of unarticulated desire.
HONORARY MENTIONS:
“Schoolgirl Crush” by Ruth Lacey. (Israel/Australia)
A gorgeous young teacher (young Brad Pitt lookalike, natch) + a middle-aged woman who is his senior in a kibbutz school + a school full of teenage girls (and boys) … what could possibly go wrong? Gripping story of desire and jealousy that doesn’t put a step wrong.
“Debt Collector” by Neil Bristow. (Ireland/Germany)
Another tight, precisely and admirably plainly written story about how a mother’s difficult moral choice is also a ticket out for her. It reads like a miniature thriller.
“Salvage” by Miriam Moss. (Sussex, UK)
A restrained, elegantly written story of secrets and what is withheld in a marriage, with agapanthus flowers providing a nice metaphorical underpinning.
“Safe from Harm” by Rick Williams. (Brighton, UK)
Tense story about Foreign Office mandarin devoured by his work and his talented pianist daughter giving the biggest concert of her career.
“This was Rapture” by David Knight-Croft. (Oxford, UK)
Interesting and beautiful story of an ultra-religious father and his teenage daughter living in isolation until a young man appears.
“In the Dark” by Sam Sanders. (London, UK)
Precisely observed and cleanly written story of a forbidden relationship.
“The Adonis Effect” by Roz DeKett. (Philadelphia, USA)
Beautifully and precisely written, if misogynistic, story about adultery and the end of a marriage.
Biographies 2017.
Sean Lusk loves short stories, aimless travel and Nikolai Gogol (hence the title of his story in this year’s anthology). He has been writing full-time for the last couple of years, since winning the Manchester Fiction prize in 2015. He is currently working on a novel set in the 1750s in Constantinople. He lives in Dorset, England and dreams of Greece, though when he finds himself in Greece he dreams of Dorset.
Bron Burgess was born in Leeds. She has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University, and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Bron has worked at the Guardian’s New Media Lab, and Film Four. She has also acted in film and television. Black Toe is her first short story. She is currently completing her novel The Shape Inside – a psychological thriller set in Leeds.
Philippa Holloway has been a zombie in a b-movie, once brought someone back from the dead, and recently visited Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone for her Creative Writing PhD research. She has curated a special feature for the New Welsh Reader on artistic responses to Wylfa nuclear power station and landscape, and has challenged herself to get published on every continent, so far achieving literary success in the US, Australia, Africa and Europe. She teaches at Edge Hill University.
Lindsay Fisher is not who he is unless he is writing. Even when he’s writing he’s not sure of who he is exactly. He is most pleased that one of his stories appears in the collection‘Stories For Homes’, an anthology sold in aid of Shelter, a UK based charity for the homeless. He is pleased to think of this doing some good in the world.
Ruth Lacey grew up in Australia and began her career as a lawyer. After moving to a small kibbutz community, she earned her MPhil in Creative Writing from Glamorgan University (South Wales) and completed a Postgraduate Semester in Writing at VCFA. Her short stories have appeared in Litro Magazine, The Best of Carve Anthology and Overland, among others. Ruth is currently working on a collection of her short fiction and an exhibition of her artwork. She lives in Israel.
Neil Bristow is a writer, teacher and translator. He has an MA in Creative Writing from UCD. His short fiction can be found in the Honest Ulsterman, Nottingham Review and Ex-Berliner, and as a playwright he has worked with, among others, the Abbey Theatre.
Miriam Moss is a writer of picture books, novels and short stories. She also works creatively with young children, teenagers and adults in schools, libraries and prisons in the UK and abroad. Her recent novel, Girl on a Plane, was inspired by being hijacked in the Middle East aged 15. Her next one is set in Africa. Her creativity is skewed by her triangular workspace and by an increasing need to be outside. www.miriammoss.com
Rick Williams’s short stories have been shortlisted for several competitions and he was runner-up in the 2015 Hilary Mantel International short story prize. After several years living abroad, he returned to England and became a journalist. He lives in Brighton with his family and works as an editor for the Guardian in London, the train journey providing the perfect opportunity to write. He has just finished a novel and is working on a collection of interlinked stories.
David Knight-Croft leads a glamorous life working as a civil servant. In 2014 he took a career break, travelled for a year, and hasn’t quite been the same since. He studied English Literature at Leeds University and the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He is currently studying for the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck, and has been published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review. He occasionally writes about travel at www.elsewhereunderwritten.com
Sam Sanders grew up in the South-West of England and now lives in South London with his wife and three kids. They put up with his occasional radio plays, erratic guitar playing and repetitive cookery. He’s very happy to have his story in the Anthology, and his wife and three kids are very happy to hear him going on about it. Honestly.
Roz DeKett lives, works, and writes in Philadelphia, USA, although she is English. Previous publication includes creative non-fiction in the English journal York Literary Review and the American children’s magazine Cricket. Roz loves theatre as much as literature and is on the board of Philadelphia’s Azuka Theatre. She’s a former BBC radio and newspaper journalist and is a graduate of the University of Leeds, UK, with a degree in English Literature and History.
