Photo by Billy Huynh, Unsplash

For those of you in the know, in our last series of Festival Days, March to August this year, we cloned the TV show,The Great British Bake Off and, instead of baking tasks, different judge duos gave festival participants the tasks of writing flash fictions to signature, technical and showstopper challenges.

Monthly judges duos were:Diane Simmons and Robert Barrett; Karen Jones and Tim Craig; Damhnait Monaghan and Alison Woodhouse; Ken Elkes and Helen Rye;, Jeanette Sheppard and Matt Kendrick and Ingrid Jendrzejewski and Neil Clark. These judges chose winners for each challenge. And eight of them kindly agreed to vote for their winner and winners for each category.Each winner receives £50 in cash. Stories were neck and neck in the points scored, but we did end up with three clear winners.

So, many congratulations to Ali McGrane who was voted winner of winners in the Signature Challenge for her story ‘This is Not a Story About a Rainstick’; Rosaleen Lynch was voted winner of winners in the Technical Challenge for her story with ‘Recipe for Sustenance to avoid the end of the world as we know it, served with fresh roles’ and Sara Hills who won winner of winners in the Showstopper Challenge for her story ‘Blue’.

These marvellous stories will be published in our fourth festival anthology, to be published by Ad Hoc Fiction in the New Year, together with allthe monthly winners.We’ll also be publishing the judges’ challenges in the anthology in case you want to use them as prompts for your own stories.

We have another monthly challenge for festival participants in the current series of festival days, which begins on October 30th. The challenges this time are based on The Great British Thrown Down. Check out the details here Judges will be looking for stories which have emotional resonance. And there’s a £30 prize for one winner each month. Oct – March.

Hope you can join us!