Flash Fiction Prize 2025: RESULTS

Winners

Short-list

Long-list

From all of us at Fish, thank you for entering your flash stories. Congratulations to the writers who  were short or long-listed, and in particular to the 10 winners whose flash stories will be published in the Fish Anthology 2025.

The launch will be during the West Cork Literary Festival, Bantry, Ireland – 16 July. Venue: Marino Church, 6.30 pm. It is a free event and all are welcome.

Winners

Judge, Tania Hershman.

Here are the 10 winning Flash Fiction Stories, as chosen by Tania Hershman, to be published in the FISH ANTHOLOGY 2025.

Comments (below) on the flash stories are from Tania, who we sincerely thank for her time and expertise. 

FIRST: Lover  by	Allegra Mullan
SECOND: Empty Space   by	Justine Sweeney
THIRD: Breath and Bone   by	Letty Butler
HONORARY MENTIONS (no particular order)
I’ve Lost a Lot of Friends Through Love  by	Ralph Storer
A.W.O.L   by	Lisa Donoghue
For a Good Time, Call . . .   by	Annalisa McMorrow
Leaving in Four   by	Rebekah Clarkson
Picture This   by	Simon Roberts
Transformations   by	Shakira Christodoulou
My Father’s Wedding   by	Xavier Combe

Allegra Mullan is a writer of fiction and poetry. She is 23 years old and lives in London. Her work has been published in the Keats-Shelly Review, The Fish Anthology, SomeSuch Magazine and Toe-Rag, amongst others.

Justine Sweeney is from Belfast in the north of Ireland. She writes software code but finds writing fiction much more interesting. Her first collection of stories was shortlisted in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025, and she was shortlisted in the Fish Short Story Award 2025. Her work appears in the Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and other places. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel.

Letty Butler is a writer and performer with a penchant for tarot cards and cheap granola. She writes across multiple genres and has just finished her second novel. This isn’t her first Fish-flavoured rodeo—she landed The Short Story Prize in 2023—and has been trying (and failing) to score a hat-trick ever since. Coming 3rd this year has really egged her on. She’s Brighton-based and represented by Alexander Cochran at Greyhound Literary. 

Ralph Storer is a widely-travelled writer best known for his award-winning series of guidebooks to the Scottish mountains. His other books include Love Scenes (a novel about films and the single life in Edinburgh), The Joy of Hillwalking and The Sex Trivia Quiz Book. He loves to disappear with a tent into the mountains of the American West, while at home he satisfies his love of adventure by attempting to create darkwave music on his computer.

Lisa Donoghue hated every single day she spent at school, so no one was more surprised than her when she became an English teacher.  She left the UK in 2005 to travel the world for a year or two, and twenty years later she has still not returned. She is currently living and teaching in Suzhou, China.

Annalisa McMorrow is an insomniac writer living in rural Northern California. But once upon a time, she lived in Los Angeles, where she worked (in no particular order) as a popcorn girl, masseuse, receptionist, casting assistant, and ghostwriter. She once won a deejay slot by penning a murder mystery in under 50 words. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, on KQED radio, and in multiple magazines that start with the letter “P.”

Rebekah Clarkson lives on Peramangk land in South Australia. Her short story cycle, Barking Dogs is published by Affirm Press. Her award-winning short stories appear in Best Australian Stories and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding Short Stories by Australian Women’(Black Inc.). Her short memoir, Dominion was recently published in The Louisville Review and forms part of a broader memoir/fiction project exploring family, religion, and missing mothers. Rebekah possesses the world’s worst sense of direction.

Simon Roberts is Based in West London. He writes short fiction and plays, and has been nominated for a number of prizes including the Bridport Short Story Prize (2023) and the Cranked Anvil Short Story Prize (2024). He was a finalist in the Plaza Prizes Short Story Award (2024). He makes regular appearances on Story Radio Podcast. Simon’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude premiered at the Questors Theatre last year. Website: Simon Roberts 

Shakira Christodoulou is a slightly niche jack-of-all-trades. Her outsize animal sculptures amused and confused island communities in Britain and Canada, she’s painted murals some liked and some didn’t, led habitat restoration for a tiny Island NGO, and is a novelist and part-time Egyptologist. People have kindly published her words on mummies, cats, and fungus, and asked her for poetry about conservation. She writes on Bluesky, and Youtubes about wildlife gardening, as WellManneredXS.

Xavier Combe is a freelance translator and conference interpreter based in France. He teaches at the University of Paris X. He has authored 2 non-fiction books and a novel in France as well as quite a few (moderately) philological op-eds in the French press. He writes and narrates most of the stories for the award-winning absurdist fiction podcast Muffy Drake produced by 2-time Peabody Award winner Jim Hall. www.muffydrake.com

Comments from judge, Tania Hershman

I had a very very hard time – harder than usual – choosing between my top three stories, it was like comparing an apple with a fighter jet with a grain of sand. Since I am not allowed to present a three-way tie, I made the choices I was required to make with only a nanogap between these three brilliant pieces. For me, they are sublime examples of the enormity of what can be conveyed in a flash story, and not just what happens but how the writer decides to bring it to us, the effect of shapes and forms on the page and how they intrigue the reader’s eye as well as the language, the characters, the story.

I found it fascinating, having judged no small number of short and short short fiction competitions, that this time there were almost no fancy, weird, complicated titles across the shortlist I was given to read. A title can do a great deal of work, especially for short pieces, whether prose, poetry or hybrids, and I think it’s worth keeping in mind and spending some time on. A title might come straight away, or might emerge slowly as you work on a piece, or afterwards. Sometimes the simplest of titles, just one or two words, is exactly right, but sometimes more is actually more!

Anyway, without further ado, congratulations first to the longlist, the shortlist, and, in fact, everyone who sends their work out into the world to be not only read but judged. It is an act of courage, of optimism, please keep doing it! And now, please congratulate my three prize-winning flash stories, all of whom rose up out of the shortlist the first time I read them, immedately going into my “Yes” pile, and then offered me more and more and more each time I re-read them. It was an honour to be asking to present my choices, and a privilege to read these stories, which will stay with me for a very long time.

1^st prize:

Lover by Allegra Mullan

If someone asked what happens in this tiny story, I’d find it hard to answer. In some ways, almost nothing, and from another angle, everything. I was immediately drawn in by the first line, and felt myself assuming how this flash would go. I was utterly delighted to be proved so wrong! The third line started to hint that this was not at all what I had thought it might be. The use of the “you” point of view is perfect, we are seeing through their eyes someone they love, someone they try and understand, looking at so closely that they even notice inside their lover’s mouth. It is intense, intimate, and with a gorgeous oddness in what the writer chooses to include: incongruities, strange pairings, critique of our consumerist society, life and death, tenderness, pain and love – and all in one paragraph. A triumph.

2^nd prize:

Empty Space by Justine Sweeney

Before even reading this wrenching flash story, seeing it on the page immediately intrigued me, with its playing with form. “Show don’t tell” is a “writing rule” I strongly object to; there are no rules, writers should write what they want in the way that want to write it. That said, I loved what this writer was showing me visually before I’d even stepped into the opening line. The reason I chose this as the second prize winner was because this writer took a plot which might have slipped into cliché and made it completely their own. I was there, I felt and heard what the narrator was feeling and thinking. It was visceral, personal, painful, finished and unfinished in that perfect way I love in a short short story, where you know it’s over and you can’t stop thinking about it.

3^rd prize:

Breath & Bone by Letty butler

Once again, a story we have heard before, and, once again, a writer takes it and makes it their own, makes it so much more than simply an account of what happens on this one day. Here we have an “I” and a “you”, and we are in that space between them, which is difficult and uncomfortable, made even more so by the excellent use of pacing. The shape of this poignant flash – two short one-sentence paragraphs at the beginning and end, and in the middle, a long one-sentence section – is so well done, as is the precise choice of words and phrases like “fractured”, “snarl”, “guzzling”, and “quiet terror”. This is everything a stunning flash can be, a whole life and a whole world in half a page.

A LITTLE ABOUT THE WINNERS:

Allegra Mullan is a writer of fiction and poetry. She is 23 years old and lives in London. Her work has been published in the Keats-Shelly Review, The Fish Anthology, SomeSuch Magazine and Toe-Rag, amongst others.

Justine Sweeney is from Belfast in the north of Ireland. She writes software code but finds writing fiction much more interesting. Her first collection of stories was shortlisted in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025, and she was shortlisted in the Fish Short Story Award 2025. Her work appears in the Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and other places. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel.

Letty Butler is a writer and performer with a penchant for tarot cards and cheap granola. She writes across multiple genres and has just finished her second novel. This isn’t her first Fish-flavoured rodeo—she landed The Short Story Prize in 2023—and has been trying (and failing) to score a hat-trick ever since. Coming 3rd this year has really egged her on. She’s Brighton-based and represented by Alexander Cochran at Greyhound Literary. 

Ralph Storer is a widely-travelled writer best known for his award-winning series of guidebooks to the Scottish mountains. His other books include Love Scenes (a novel about films and the single life in Edinburgh), The Joy of Hillwalking and The Sex Trivia Quiz Book. He loves to disappear with a tent into the mountains of the American West, while at home he satisfies his love of adventure by attempting to create darkwave music on his computer.

Lisa Donoghue hated every single day she spent at school, so no one was more surprised than her when she became an English teacher.  She left the UK in 2005 to travel the world for a year or two, and twenty years later she has still not returned. She is currently living and teaching in Suzhou, China.

Annalisa McMorrow is an insomniac writer living in rural Northern California. But once upon a time, she lived in Los Angeles, where she worked (in no particular order) as a popcorn girl, masseuse, receptionist, casting assistant, and ghostwriter. She once won a deejay slot by penning a murder mystery in under 50 words. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, on KQED radio, and in multiple magazines that start with the letter “P.”

Rebekah Clarkson lives on Peramangk land in South Australia. Her short story cycle, Barking Dogs is published by Affirm Press. Her award-winning short stories appear in Best Australian Stories and Something Special, Something Rare: Outstanding Short Stories by Australian Women’(Black Inc.). Her short memoir, Dominion was recently published in The Louisville Review and forms part of a broader memoir/fiction project exploring family, religion, and missing mothers.  Rebekah possesses the world’s worst sense of direction.

Simon Roberts is Based in West London. He writes short fiction and plays, and has been nominated for a number of prizes including the Bridport Short Story Prize (2023) and the Cranked Anvil Short Story Prize (2024). He was a finalist in the Plaza Prizes Short Story Award (2024). He makes regular appearances on Story Radio Podcast. Simon’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude premiered at the Questors Theatre last year. Website: Simon Roberts 

Shakira Christodoulou is a slightly niche jack-of-all-trades. Her outsize animal sculptures amused and confused island communities in Britain and Canada, she’s painted murals some liked and some didn’t, led habitat restoration for a tiny Island NGO, and is a novelist and part-time Egyptologist. People have kindly published her words on mummies, cats, and fungus, and asked her for poetry about conservation. She writes on Bluesky, and Youtubes about wildlife gardening, as WellManneredXS.

Short-list:

(Alphabetical order: 30 stories)

Long-list:

In alphabetical order (100)