National Flash Fiction Day 2025

The 2025 competition is now closed.

Watch this space for long and short lists, and thank you for your interest!

Prizes:

First: $1000
Second: $400
Third: $200

Submissions guidelines and entry rules are below.

Judges

The 2025 NFFD judges are Brannavan Gnanalingam and Vana Manasiadis.

The 2025 NFFD youth judge is Shilo Kino.

A good flash piece is a tickle, a pinch or a slap, and leaves the mind tingling. Poetry can do that too, but more through surprising use of words, than through plot or an unseen ending.

P S Cottier

Flash fiction – a rooster running this way and that, his red comb lighting small fires in the woods.

Frankie McMillan

There’s hardly any form that offers so much fun among so many challenges and at the same time teaches you so much about life.

Elizabeth Smither

Short on words but long on depth, flash fiction stings like good poetry. Punchy, succinct and surprising, the best flash stories shift the reader’s heart but they also keep it beating hard.

Nuala Ni Chonchuir

Writing flash fiction is like riding a wobbly unicycle between suggestion and explanation, between innuendo and a slap in the face, between compression and deflation, between rabbit and hat, between poetry and prose. Writing it successfully, is negotiating a tiny circuit without falling off.

James Norcliffe

The best stories are those where the reader is made immediately but implicitly aware that something else is going on here. These stories are artful, but so well crafted, so cleverly understated, that the reader becomes irresistibly engaged with the story.

Graeme Lay

Brannavan Gnanalingam

Brannavan Gnanalingam is a novelist and lawyer based in Wellington. He has written eight novels, including Sprigs and Sodden Downstream (both shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Foundation Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards) and A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (longlisted for the same award). He is also a regular columnist for the Sunday Star-Times and won a Qantas Media Award (as it was then known) in 2009 as a reviewer with the Lumière Reader. His latest novel is The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat.

Vana Manasiádis

Vana Manasiádis | Βάνα Μανασιάδη is a poet, editor and translator, and the author of four books including Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima and The Grief Almanac: A Sequel. She has been a Michael King and Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence and is now Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha Canterbury University. From July she will be in Crete to work on her next book, another experiment in hybridity and autofiction, and to welcome the Greek translation of The Grief Almanac in a very small bookshop.

Shilo Kino

Youth judge Shilo Kino (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maniapotoi) is the author of All That We Know, published by Moa Press in July 2024 and long-listed for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the Ockham Book Awards. Her first novel The Porangi Boy won the Young Adult Fiction Award at the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards. Her work has published in the New Zealand Herald, The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, The Guardian, Stuff and Huia Short Stories collections.

Previous Judges

2012 Graeme Lay, Tina Shaw, Stephen Stratford
2013 David Lyndon Brown, Vivienne Plumb
2014 Mary McCallum, Frankie McMillan
2015 Fiona Kidman, Owen Marshall
2016 James Norcliffe, Elizabeth Smither
2017 Michael Harlow, Emma Neale
2018 Tracey Slaughter, Sue Wootton
2019 Siobhan Harvey, Lloyd Jones
2020 Sandra Arnold, Helen Heath
2021 Diane Brown, Paula Morris
2022 Anne Kennedy, Kiri Piahana-Wong
2023 Airini Beautrais, David Eggleton
2024 Lynn Jenner, Rachel O'Neill