National Flash Fiction Day 2023

THE 2023 COMPETITION IS CLOSED.

Find the 2023 winners here!

All winning stories are published at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction.

Youth stories are published at fingers comma toes.

And see/ hear the winning micros from Micro Madness, shared a micro a day June 01-June 22.

Prizes:

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

Submissions guidelines and entry rules are below.

Judges

The 2023 judges for the national competition are 2019-22 Poet Laureate David Eggleton and 2021 Ockham award-winning writer Airini Beautrais.

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

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

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

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

Airini Beautrais

Airini Beautrais won the 2021 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the Ockham NZ Book Awards for her short story collection Bug Week (THWUP, 2020). She is also the author of four collections of poetry, including Flow: Whanganui River Poems (THWUP, 2017). Her first collection, Secret Heart (THWUP, 2006), won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2007 NZ Book Awards.

In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize, and her work has also appeared in a range of journals and anthologies in Aotearoa and elsewhere. She has also been a judge for a number of awards, including the 2018 NZ Book Awards. She lives in Whanganui with her two sons and two cats.

David Eggleton

David Eggleton was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He has edited Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Café Reader. Currently he is back editing Landfall Review Online. His book The Conch Trumpet won the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. Also in 2016, he received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

David's collection, The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and a new collection, Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022, is published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.

Past 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