FFF Competition Twenty-Seven Judge’s Report by Chris Cottom
22nd May 2025
I’ve been lucky enough to have judged an FFF competition once before. This time, when Ian Rushton invited me, he said, ‘you can say no.’ I replied that actually I couldn’t, because I’d enjoyed it so much last year. And again, what a privilege it’s been to consider each of the fifteen longlisted stories, to allow each of them to speak to me in their different ways.
The narrator in the shortlisted story ‘A Quiet Night In’ shows us, through a parade of homely and detailed anecdotes, how full of love she is for her ‘soft as marshmallow’ son. The author skilfully presents him, not as a mummy’s boy, but as a kid any parent should be proud of. Prefer Jennifer Aniston to a six-episode Netflix slasher? Yep, I’ll have one of those, please. In fact, Mum loves her ‘not-my-little-boy-anymore’ so much that it seems she hasn’t been telling us the whole truth. As she concludes by telling him to listen carefully, listing the further lies he himself must tell, I get the impression he’ll do exactly what she says.
The marvellously titled shortlisted story ‘Letter Soup’ is a deceptively simple tale about something that isn’t simple for everyone: getting your tongue around English words and reading them aloud in public, all the while being sized up by chuckling ‘fellow students with invisible measuring tapes’, getting stuck over a word that hovers ‘like a hummingbird on the page’ before it clicks ‘like a seatbelt's tongue sliding into the buckle’. But this piece is about much more than difficulty and judgment. It’s a heartwarming picture of human connection, about reaching out to a fellow traveller, about making friends.
The ‘two urban fox cubs’ of the shortlisted story ‘Staying Strong’ are self-reliant but vulnerable. I’ve chosen to see the narrator as the older sister of ‘apple-cheeked’ Danny, unable to stop his Geronimo leap into a ‘swirl of ripples’ but growing up very fast in those agonising seconds before he surfaces, ‘roaring like a swamp monster.’ Off the page, we can be confident that she’ll tell her brother the truth of their mother’s love, and replace her own hasty bitterness with kinder memories. This is a convincing portrait of two young people catapulted, too early, into caring for one another. I reckon they’ll keep calling each other names, keep grinning as they do it. I reckon they’re going to be okay.
The highly commended story ‘Fire & Ashes’ hits the reader hard, right in the second sentence: ‘until they sold her yesterday’. Something awful has happened, and it happened yesterday. The author twists the knife by showing us that Mama was both good-hearted (‘mended bones and salved lacerated backs’) and unbroken (‘every obstacle shelters a kernel of hope’). Then the author hits us again: the narrator is ‘a girl of thirteen … a gift to disgusting overseers’. The reader shouldn’t imagine they’re off the hook because the author adroitly reserves the final kicker until the end. The narrator has lived their whole life ‘on this hell of a plantation’. Wish her well as she flees, exultant and fearless, and relish her bravery.
I was immediately drawn to the protagonist of the highly commended ‘The Boy On The Ann Alexander’, a boy who ‘doesn’t want to die … on a velvet night like this beneath a sky hung with a million laughing stars’, a boy who hopes for dolphins ‘beckoning him like messengers from a better place.’ This is an extremely accomplished story about violence and cruelty, innocence and exploitation, powerlessness and honesty, told with fabulous period detail (‘the cry goes up for a whale’), and with a restraint (‘though most have used him ill’) which invites the reader into the boy’s world, and finally to salute his moral courage as a ‘tiny dancing part of him’ cheers the pain-maddened whale at the very moment it threatens disaster.
The winning story, ‘Gilded Edges’, is both achingly personal – ‘the shoulder squeeze from medical staff’ – and, at the same time, universal. We don’t know, or need to know, the characters’ names, ages, sex, or relationship. This enables us to slip in alongside the narrator as they unfurl from fist-clenched rage, through ‘moments of comfort and beauty’ and the simple ministrations of the respectful cleaner (like ‘picking up fallen tissues’), to ultimate acceptance. This is a beautifully written piece, rich in imagery and tenderness. The person in the hospice bed might be beyond smoothies, their body wracked and ragged, yet they’re dignified and composed, and they’ve left the silk thread in exactly the right translucent, gold-leafed page of their grandfather’s bible.
Chris Cottom
chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom