We’re delighted to announce the winner, runner up, and a highly commended entry to our Flash Fiction Competition 2021.
Winner – Ian Coldicott
Runner Up – Sally Jenkins
Highly Commended – Chris Lee
The competition was judged by 4 independent judges – Claire Bennett, Charles Mundye, Kelly Ashes and Mohammed Rizwan, one of the runners up in last year’s Flash Fiction competition. The 25 entries were whittled down to a shortlist of 9, from which the Winner and Runner Up were chosen, which the judges taking the decision to also highlight the entry by Chris Lee.
Claire said, “Reading Folio’s Flash Fiction 2021 entries during COP26 made “Bovine Protest” stand out as a zeitgeist treat. Its harnessing of tech savvy youth with outraged protesting “oldies” to release the herd was such fun.
Being asked to judge these tiny stories was a huge delight. The Flash Fiction writers of Sutton Coldfield are a talented, surprising, clever and entertaining bunch whose variety of style and topic was epic. The bar is certainly set high for 2022!”
Charles said, “It was on honour to judge Folio’s Flash Fiction competition, and there was so much packed into all the entries I read, covering Sutton Coldfield from the early 16th century to the current pandemic. The stories were topical, political, lyrical, mysterious, and ranged from horror to comedy. There’s such a lot of great writing out there.
Of the winners, ‘Old Jack Barnes’ reminded me of some of the great ghost stories but in miniature form. Is this really an encounter with the supernatural, or is the narrator predisposed to imagine ghosts wherever they look, rooting around in the park for traces of a past long gone? Is the discovery of the old golf ball merely coincidence? These questions are powerfully unresolved in a story that draws on local history with a true eye for detail.
And ‘City Status’ packs a great deal into its 250 words – topical references to the Commonwealth Games, the Royal family, park maintenance, town planning, how social media works. It’s a quixotic tale of hobbyist obsession and politics, falling from innocence into experience.”
Zoe Toft, Chair of FOLIO Sutton Coldfield said, “FOLIO was delighted to once again be able to run our micro short story competition, encouraging creative writing across and inspired by our town. We’re really grateful for the support from Sutton Coldfield Neighbourhood Network Scheme for making this possible, as part of our Telling Sutton’s Stories project. My thanks to everyone who took part, as writer or judge.”
The stories can now also be read on the Telling Sutton Stories’s website. The stories are also on display in Sutton Coldfield Library. A special thankyou to the Royal Sutton Coldfield Chronicle for publishing the stories in their Christmas 2021 edition.
