National Flash Fiction Day 2024

The 2024 competition is now closed.

Watch this space for news of long lists and short lists in late May/early June.
Winners will be announced June 22.

Prizes:

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

Submissions guidelines and entry rules are below.

Judges

The 2024 judges for the national competition are award-winning writers Lynn Jenner and Rachel O’Neill.

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

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

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

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

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

Frankie McMillan

Lynn Jenner

Lynn Jenner is a Northland-based writer and teacher of poetry, essays and creative non-fiction. Lynn has a particular interest in genre-bending writing. In 2023 Lynn’s poetry appeared in Landfall 246, Turbine Kapohau and The Spinoff. All three of Lynn’s published books use fragments and juxtaposition to create a narrative. Dear Sweet Harry (AUP 2010) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry prize. Lost and Gone Away (AUP 2015) was a Metro Best Books (2015) selection and finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2016). Peat (OUP 2109) combined the story of a road built against the wishes of a community with an exploration of the politics and aesthetics of Charles Brasch, founding editor of Landfall.

Rachel O’Neill

Rachel O’Neill is a filmmaker, writer and artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. The author of One Human in Height (Hue & Cry Press, 2013) and Requiem for a Fruit (We are Babies/Tender Press, 2021), Rachel has received a range of development grants, commissions and residencies including the 2023 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writing Fellowship. In their practice they strive to seek out fresh ways to see and understand the human condition and to unearth the humour and strangeness that underlie experience. For more, visit their website.

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
2023 Airini Beautrais, David Eggleton