2021 Open Competition Results
Our short story open competition for 2021 finally drew to a close on 1st March. We say finally because we really should acknowledge the admin error at the end which closed the competition a day early by mistake! Thanks to those eagle-eyed people out there who let us know and enabled us to rectify the error to keep the competition open until the advertised date and please accept our apologies for any confusion.
The standard of entries seems to grow each year and we were delighted to receive so may of them this time around. Our BWC judges had a tough job as always but managed to prepare a shortlist of ten stories to put forward to the final judge who had this to say in summary:
After re-reading each story a number of times, I had decided on the three well written winners with two others as well which were worthy of consideration.
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Back to re-reading those five, noting use of humour, speed of the stories, how well the interest of the reader was firmly held and other things, I have at last decided on the three winners below but felt sorrow that I had to lose the other two, it was a hard decision.
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Wendy Nottingham
1st Place - The Companion by Kayleigh Maddocks
2nd Place - Healing Hands by Katherine Shand
3rd Place - To Eggs Benedict and Back by JM Curry
The two other stories chosen by Wendy but just narrowly missing out on one of the prizes were:
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Give Us This Day (Our Daily Bread)
Into the Woods
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And the remaining five shortlisted pieces which thoroughly deserve a mention are:
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Not Being Funny, Jason
Paste
The Colour of Sweet
The Deluge
The Old Man Who Was Lost at Sea
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who submitted entries, it really was a great competition this year and was a real showcase of talented writers.