In July
2000, my story For a Yellow Jersey, already a first prizewinner, won
World Wide Writers £3,000 award for Best Short Story of the year. Allan Prior, author of
20 novels, 250 television scripts and 70 radio plays was the judge. His
comments on For a Yellow Jersey were: A tour of the Tour de France! I
felt I was in the saddle all through this long short story, so gripping – on a
high technical and emotional level – was this vivid and informative piece of
writing… Fit for the New Yorker at least.
Success
in World Wide Writers competition included publication in a very nice,
perfect-bound magazine, voted one of the top 20 in the world by influential
American magazine Writers’ Digest. World Wide Writers paid out
substantial prize money but is now sadly defunct, having been merged (without
trace as far as I can see) into its sister magazine, Writers Forum.
Some of my other
prizewinning stories are:
Resja
Downsized
Scorpio, Scorpio...
Man of
the House
Bless
me Father
Love-All
Malenkaya
The
Angel of Kresnik
Throughout
its 31-issue life, I was joint editor of BuzzWords magazine, responsible for its
fiction content. Because of or perhaps in spite of that, I have often been
involved in organizing and judging writing competitions.
For BuzzWords
competitions, we editors always read every story in full ourselves and did not
pass them out to inexperienced readers or simply skim through the first
paragraph. Yes, it did mean a lot of work for us but we felt that the people
who paid us the money deserved to have their
work taken seriously.
Here are
some really good competitions:
The Bridport
Prize (UK) offers £5,000 and considerable kudos if you are even shortlisted.
Another well regarded competition is the Fish Prize - €10,000 (
In
Australia, where I now live, the Melbourne-based Age
newspaper has an annual short story competition paying A$ 3,000.
This also is free to enter.
Competitions
run by good small press literary magazines are worth entering because they help
to keep the magazines in print; the prize money is incidental.