Competition Seventeen Judge’s Report by Sarah Royston
15th September 2023
Thank you to Ian Rushton and the FFF readers for running this excellent competition, and to all the writers who submitted their work. It has been a real pleasure to read the 15 long-listed stories and to offer my (highly subjective!) thoughts.
Every piece had its own power, from the bittersweet tenderness of ‘Soft furnishings can last for years with love and careful handling’ and ‘Salix Babylonica’, to the rock’n’roll energy of ‘Just a Week in Eternity’. Each writer brought their own fresh angle: ‘A life more ordinary’ gave an intriguing glimpse of the strangeness underlying everyday things, while ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ wove a lyrical feminist re-storying of the traditional tale.
I was impressed by the skilful use of language in the stories, particularly the mouthwatering sensory detail of ‘Apples’; the chilling atmosphere of ‘The Signalman’s Daughter’; and the elegant viscerality of ‘Hands into Fists’. The heartfelt evocation of the vulnerability of a mother and baby in ‘The endless bathtub’ brought tears to my eyes. Equally compelling was the biting satire of ‘My Dad, the Druid’, with its deft demolition of a bigoted (and horribly convincing) character.
The five pieces on my shortlist were all beautifully crafted but were also the stories that most lingered in my mind, challenging me to unpick their layers. ‘Lost Property’ is an unsettling piece, with the narrator’s objectification of a girl’s “exotic otherness”, and the sinister sense that she may be the “property” in question. ‘Temima’ is richly nuanced and disturbing, its intense fragments hinting at a dark history beyond the page.
The Highly Commended story ‘Ocularity’ had me enthralled from the first sentence to the startling resolution, savouring its exquisite multi-sensory language. I especially love the description of hair with “the trusting warmth of an animal in sleep”. I’ll be returning to reread this piece as a masterclass in magical realism.
Also Highly Commended, ‘Pig Willow’ is something of a wild card. At first, I wondered: Is this flash fiction at all, or a poem, an incantation, a lament, a twisted playground rhyme? But by then it was too late; the words had got under my skin. Whatever it is, this piece is wrenching, mesmerising, haunting. It feels very old and entirely new. It gives me shivers every time I read it.
Finally, ‘Frontier’ transported me instantly to its dusty gold-rush setting through its powerful conjuring of time and place (amazing in so few words). The language throughout is stunning, with its glittering imagery of grit and gold. The child narrator brings an original voice, and the mother-daughter relationship gives the story real heart without sentimentality. I was utterly drawn into their lives, and their struggles to carry on “when hope was trodden to muck”. When I reached the last line, with its simple beauty, I knew this piece had to be my winner.
Sarah Royston
Click here to read the FFF Competition Sixteen winner - Three rites for a passage by Sarah Royston