Jane Belle won the Margaret and Reg Turnill Prize (Under 22) for “The Syrup Boy of Whickering Moor” and LM Bestie took the Senior Prize with “Halfway Through The In-Between”.

Congratulations to Jane Belle, LM Bestie and all our shortlisted authors, whose stories appear in our 2025 anthology “The Middle Ground”.

Buy The Middle Ground from Amazon.

Buy The Middle Ground as a Kindle download from Amazon.

Start thinking now for our 2026 competition theme of “The Cheat”. the 2026 competition will open for entries via our website in late January 2026.

The 2025 Award ceremony, including readings from many of our shortlisted authors, is available on our Facebook page.

Shortlist for Junior Competition, The Margaret and Reg Turnill Prize

Shortlist for the Senior Competition, The Grand Prize

The post 2025 HG Wells Short Story Competition Winners and Awards appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

The 2023 Anthology of “Motion” is available now on Amazon at:

• Buy “Motion” on Amazon (UK)
• Buy “Motion” on Amazon (US)
• Elsewhere search on Amazon for “Motion Joyce”

The Award Ceremony is broadcast on our Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/HGWellsShortStoryCompetition “live” and will be available to watch back until the end of 2023. The ceremony starts with a presentation by Dr Paul March-Russell on Men Like Gods.

2023 Margaret and Reg Turnill Prize

• Radiyah Nouman reading from Away the Water Drains
• Yuen Tong Law reading from Cast Out of Heaven [reading live]
• Kantaphat Pinaree reading from Elegy for A Machine [reading live]
• Catherine Saunders reading from Figurehead
• Pritha Halder reading from Ladies’ Compartment [reading live]
• Thalia Peterson reading from Pareidolia
• Gloria Mesa reading from Rain Dance by Leyelle [reading live]
• Charlotte Moran reading from The Death of the Ticket Collector [reading live]
• Sarah-Kate Simons reading from The Matchmaker [reading live]
• Allison VanHuysen reading from The Resonance of the Zucchini [reading live]
• Tessa Shutter reading from When a car dies on a deserted road does it make a sound

2023 Senior Prize

• Kerry Ryan reading from A Parcel of Rogues [reading live]
• Steven Jackson reading from A Static Hero [reading live]
• Arthur Neong reading from A Walk in the Park [reading live]
• Jarick Weldon reading from Currents from Cabo Verde
• Katie Rizzo reading from Endless Horizon
• Mary Onions reading from Grounded [reading live]
• Mary Onions reading from Pilgrimage [reading live]
• Keltie Zubko reading from The Last Teardown of Eleanor
• Anna Linstrum reading from Untethered [Not reading]
• Ashia Mirza reading from Yahya’s Garden [reading live]

The post The HG Wells Short Story Competition Awards 2023 appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

These two writing workshops will look at ways of creating character within the restrictions of the short story form. In the first session we will identify the means by which character is defined and look at examples by prominent short story writers. Students will then be given a photograph and asked to write a short piece focusing on the characterisation of the person in the image. The second session will consist of peer reviews of the pieces written.

Participants are asked to attend both sessions to make best use of this workshop. Numbers are limited to 10 per workshop and you need to register in advance to receive login details to these Zoom sessions.

Dates:

• Seniors (Over 21): 26 May and 9 June at 7pm [participants should attend BOTH sessions]

• Juniors (under 22): 4 and 11 June at 2pm [participants should attend BOTH sessions]

Please note that we will be observing the same protocols as the 2022 HG Wells Short Story Competition where all submissions are also judged anonymously.

The two free workshops offer aspiring writers the opportunity to learn, write and share ideas online.

Both of our free writing workshops will be held via Zoom with Sarah Anthony. Participants will be limited to 10 on a first come first served basis so sign up now!

Register online:

• Seniors (Over 21) session sign-up (26 May and 9 June at 7pm)

• Juniors (under 22) session sign-up (4 and 11 June at 2pm)

Login details and course details will be emailed to registered participants by no later than 8pm on 12th June by Sarah Anthony. Please watch your email after registration for her message.

About Sarah Anthony

Sarah Anthony graduated from Bristol University with a degree in English and French literature. Her MA with the Open University followed, specialising in postcolonial literature. She has worked for the School of English at the University of Kent, co-ordinating their part-time programmes in English and American literature and Creative Writing and acting as academic advisor to international students.

Sarah has 15 years’ experience lecturing and teaching university undergraduates and adult learners at the University of Kent, for the Workers’ Educational Association and for the U3A. She has taught on subjects as disparate as the plays of Christopher Marlowe and the writers of the Windrush Generation, and has taken part in a TV documentary on E M Forster for international arts and culture channel ARTE.  Current projects include the novels of John Steinbeck, the Bloomsbury Group, and 20th century Russian literature.

Register online:

• Seniors (Over 21) session sign-up (26 May and 9 June at 7pm)

• Juniors (under 22) session sign-up (4 and 11 June at 2pm)

The post H G Wells Short Story Workshops: Creating Character appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

• 2021 Margaret and Reg Turnill Prize Winner: Sarah-Kate Simons for Swamp Thing

• 2021 Senior Prize Winner: Peter Collins for The Domino Effect

We had our biggest entry ever this year for both competitions. Congratulations to all our shortlisted authors, and especially our winners Sarah-Kate and Peter!

The 2021 Anthology of Mask will be available soon: https://hgwellscompetition.com/h-g-wells-competition-short-story-anthologies/

We’re also delighted to announce the theme of the 2022 competition: Switch. Make of it what you will!

The Award Ceremony was broadcast on our Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/HGWellsShortStoryCompetition “live” and will be available to watch back until the end of 2021.

Introduction

Tony Quarrington on Sandgate as home to HG Wells [Video]

2021 Margaret and Reg Turnill Prize

Jessica Brien reading from Soup for Starters [Reading Live]

Clara Chiu reading from Masquerade [Video]

Sophia Felsinger reading from Bitter Plums [Video]

Sarah Holm reading from The Shopkeeper [Reading live]

Mia Ramage reading from The Collector’s Shop [Video]

Sumedha Sengupta reading from The Suitor [Reading live]

Winner: Sarah-Kate Simons reading from Swamp Thing [Reading Live]

Nathan Steward reading from Mask [Video] 

Weiyen Tan reading from Fear of the Mask [Reading Live]

2021 Senior Prize

Houssam Alissa: The Trojan Horse [Video]

Fija Callaghan: An Ephemeral Quality [Not reading]

Winner: Peter Collins: The Domino Effect [Not reading]

Simha Haddad reading from Fun and Games [Video]

Katherine Haynes reading from Dreams of Impossible Cowslips [Reading Live]

E. S. Heffernan reading from We, the Dead [Video]

Tony Hunter-Craig reading from Masks of Respectability [Video]

Bethany Ridley-Duff reading from The Other Face [Reading Live]

Lee Stoddart: Ham, Egg and Chips [Not reading]

Sarah Townend reading from The Beauty Parlour [Video]

Dan Vanvick reading from The Enemy Next Door [Video]

Stephen Webb reading from Area 37 [Video]

The post 2021 HG Wells Short Story Competition Award Winners and Ceremony appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

The HG Wells Short Story team were delighted to hear from 2020 shortlisted author Rhiannon Lewis with news of her very own new book “I Am the Mask Maker“.

The book includes “The Last Flight of La Librairie d’Afrique du Nord” which was included in our 2020 anthology of shortlisted stories.

Rhiannon explained that although she didn’t enter our competition this year, the theme, Mask, did inspire her to write the story which gives the book its name: “I Am the Mask Maker” and other stories. Rhiannon said:

“I meant to enter it for the competition, but the story did what stories often do, it developed a life of its own and ended up being nearly 6,000 words long. Far too long for the competition! I couldn’t chop it to fit and so it stayed. But thank you for providing the inspiration for a brand new story.”

“I Am the Mask Maker and other stories” is available for pre-order now.

Congratulations Rhiannon!

The post I Am the Maskmaker appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

Click here to order your copy today.

‘Strange Roof’ is a collection that delivers exquisite explorations of distance, loneliness, and the constant tug of home. It also delineates with grace and ferocity the price that life exacts from women, the scars it inflicts; physical scars, and psychological ones.’

– Danielle McLaughlin, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, The New Yorker

‘Catherine Higgins-Moore’s use of language to embolden and communicate experience inspires and excites. She is not afraid of anything. Her confident gritty flair inks life into a world both known and unknown. A joy resides in these pages. A bold and fearless joy.’

– Lisa O’Donnell, The Death of Bees, Winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize

Catherine Higgins-Moore is a Northern Irish writer based in New York. She writes for The Times Literary Supplement and is founding editor of The Irish Literary Review. Catherine has worked in the newsrooms of BBC Belfast and BBC Oxford. She holds Master’s degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford.

In 2016 Catherine was shortlisted for a Pen Parentis Fellowship, the Ted Hughes Elmet Trust Award, and the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year. In both 2014 and 2015 Catherine was shortlisted for the HG Wells Grand Prize. Also in 2015, she was nominated for Oxford Brookes International Poetry Award. In 2014 she was shortlisted for Cambridge University’s Jane Martin Girton College Poetry Prize. Catherine’s short fiction has been nominated for the Bath Short Story Prize and The Asham Award.

Her writing has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Gathering, Embers of Words: An Irish Anthology of Migrant Poetry, in American journal Northern Liberties Review, alongside writers Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, John Betjeman and Bob Dylan in Heart Shoots, The Cherwell, The Honest Ulsterman and Prole.

Catherine’s play Just Two People was produced at The Oxford Playhouse’s Burton Taylor Studio in November 2010. She was offered one of eight places on Columbia University’s M.F.A in Playwriting. Columbia’s Course Director, Playwright Charles Mee, said of the 2008 intake:

“We admitted a class of unusually bright, talented, interesting, surprising, risk-taking students, and, among them, Catherine is a standout. She is a remarkably smart, gifted, adventurous writer. [Her] work… is outstanding—strikingly original and fresh, beautifully crafted, startlingly accomplished.”

Catherine has been awarded bursaries by Kenneth Branagh, and the Mawby Foundation at Kellogg College, Oxford.

The post HG Wells Prize Shortlisted Author Catherine releases “Strange Roof” appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

If you have any questions, please email me at hgwellscompetition@gmail.com

The post New personnel! appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

To let you know that Stewart Ross is no longer Chair of the HGWSSC and I am no longer administrator, so apologies if you have contacted either for any information via this website or Facebook page.

I am sure your queries will all be answered as soon as possible by a member of the Committee.

Very best wishes

Lucy

The post Change of personnel appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY:

Sunday 17 July 2016 :  final date for entries

Wednesday 21 September 2016 : shortlists announced

Sunday 27 November 2016 : Awards Ceremony

The post HGWSSC THEME FOR 2016 and dates for your diary appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.

The post PRIZE WINNERS of the HGWSSC 2015 appeared first on The HG Wells Short Story Competition.