News

Final Week

We’re in the final week before our 2021 BSSA competition closes at midnight BST on Monday April 19TH! We hope you’ve enjoyed the recent posts full of editing tips and words of encouragement from writers we admire and hope you found some inspiration. As our competition comes to a close, we’d like to share with you Kurt Vonnegut’s eight essential pieces of advice.
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Ten Tiny Tweaks with Two Weeks to Go!

With two weeks to go until the £1750 prize fund 2021 Bath Short Story Award, judged by Norah Perkins, from Curtis Brown, closes at midnight on Monday April 19th, try these ten tiny tweaks to your story before you enter. Continue reading →

THE RULE OF THREE – 3 weeks to go!

Just THREE weeks to go until the 2021 Award closes on Monday, April 19th. With a prize fund of £1750 and the chance to be in our next anthology, it’s definitely worth putting hitting the keyboard now. The following has been taken from a previous post – all about the ‘Rule of Three.’ Continue reading →

INTERVIEW WITH BSSA, 2020 SECOND PRIZE WINNER, SHARON TELFER

Sharon Telfer

FOUR WEEKS TODAY UNTIL OUR 2021 AWARD CLOSES ON MONDAY 19TH APRIL

In conversation with team member Alison Woodhouse, Sharon reveals how her prize winning story ‘Under a Whalebone Roof’ evolved and has some sage advice about persistence and redrafting. Our 2020 anthology is available from adhocfiction and Amazon in both paperback and digital versions. Continue reading →

A Compilation of Writing Advice

Photo by Ryan Jones at Unsplash

It’s five weeks today until our 2021 Award closes on Monday April 19th, 2021.

To help you edit and shape your short story before submitting it, we’ve compiled a selection of tips from some writers we’ve interviewed over the years. We first posted this advice back in 2016 and there’s some really useful comments on beginnings, endings, themes, creating a stand-out story, titles and that all-important fine-editing. Continue reading →

International Women’s Day, March 8th

International Women’s Day (IWD)  celebrates the political, social, economic and cultural achievements of women and is 110 years old on March 8th. It began in the USA in 1909 as National Women’s Day, in response to a campaign for better pay, shorter hours and voting rights. At an international conference for working women in Copenhagen, Clara Zetkin, a political activist, suggested making it international and from that time it was marked in different countries around the world (mainly in Europe). It wasn’t until 1975 that the United Nations made it official and for each year there’s a different theme. In 2021 the theme is #ChooseToChallenge : to call out gender bias and inequality.

There are so many inspirational women who have made history and continue to do so and this young writer with Bath connections is nothing short of remarkable. Continue reading →

Interview with BSSA 2020 first prize winner, Marissa Hoffmann

Marissa Hoffmann

Find out in this interview with Marissa Hoffmann, how her prize winning story ‘The Pencil Drawn Girl’ came into being, learn what she likes about writing short fiction and who her favourite short story writers are and get some great advice for writing a short story for a competition. Her winning story is the first one in our 2020 anthology, available from adhocfiction and Amazon in both paperback and digital versions.

Marissa Hoffmann’s fiction won the Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2019 and her stories have been variously podium-placed or listed in international competitions such as Mslexia, FlashBack Fiction, Fish, Flash Frontier’s Micro Madness and Reflex. Her flash stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, BIFFY 50 and Best Micro Fiction and one of her stories appears on the US Wigleaf Top 50 2020 long list. Read more about Marissa on www.marissahoffmann.com. She is currently working on her first novel. You can follow Marissa @Hoffmannwriter.
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Launch of the 2020 BSSA Anthology, December 11th, 2020

Well, that was different! Last night’s launch for the 2020 BSSA anthology ended with a ‘Goodbye from Newfoundland’, New Zealand, Ottawa, Iowa, Switzerland, Italy and various regions of the UK from Harrogate to Stroud. Such is Zoom. This made for a truly international and inclusive event – but we did miss the atmosphere of Mr B’s, where we’ve held our past six anthology launches. It’s such a cosy, enticing bookshop – the perfect place to share wine and nibbles while listening to the readings. Continue reading →