Blog & Results

September 20th, 2021 Open Short Story Competition 2021 winners

9/20/2021

The winning entry receives £100, 2nd place £70, 3rd place £30, two highly commended entries each receive a free entry to our Open Short Story Competition 2022.

Thank you to all entrants for sending stories to enable us to provide this competition. Our thanks also to Helen Baggott, our judge. Helen's feedback for each story will be published on the same page as the stories. You'll need to scroll down and this is in order to allow you to read the stories before reading the comments.

The winning entries will be published on our website before the end of the week and we welcome your comments, if you'd like to make any, about them.

If you would like to judge our Open Short Story Competition 2022 (a small fee is paid to the judge) please email Debbie at erewashwriterscomps2 at gmail.com

Please find below the result for this competition:

LONG LISTED ENTRIES

A few bad apples
Bending the Truth
Burning Desire
Chestnut Tree House
Curse of Eve
Dear Neighbour
Diamond Life
Easy Enough to Smile
Establishing the Provenance of Elderly Ladies
Flight Recorder
Grass Widow
Letting off Steam
Loving Antony
Missing Heritage
Queen of the Castle
Quiet Love
Remembering Lily
Second Chances
Serendipity
Sinking Water
Something in Common
Soon it will be spring
Strange Encounter
Summer Breeze
The Coalman's Daughter
The Pewter Thimble
The Runaway
The Sum of the Parts

SHORT LISTED ENTRIES

Burning Desire
Curse of Eve
Diamond Life
Easy Enough to Smile
Establishing the Provenance of Elderly Ladies
Flight Recorder
Grass Widow
Letting off Steam
Loving Antony
Missing Heritage
Quiet Love
Remembering Lily
Something in Common
The Coalman's Daughter
The Pewter Thimble
The Sum of the Parts

CONGRATULATIONS to the following five winners:

Fifth place – Easy enough to smile by Liz Andersen

Fourth place – Grass Widow by Tony Oswick

Third place – Quiet Love by Sam Szanto

Second place – The Sum of the Parts by Ann Abineri

First place – Something in Common by Valerie Bowes

Winning entries to be announced ...

9/19/2021

We will publish the result for our Open Short Story Competition
on Monday 20th September 2021 after 6pm.

Critiques will be emailed before end of October 2021, if not earlier.

Keep an eye on the website. We are in the process of
creating more competitions for you to enter.

This page was updated 19th September 2021

HOLIDAY ROMANCE - And the winner is ...

6/30/2021

Thank you to all entrants. We thoroughly enjoyed reading your stories and poetry. To choose just one has not been an easy decision.

Winner of the £10 prize is Vivienne Moles and we will post the winning entry itself to the website in the next few days.

Keep an eye on the website. We'll be providing more free entry comps soon, but in the meantime, we'd love to receive your short stories for our annual Open Short Story Competition 2021, judged by Helen Baggott. Closes Thursday 22nd July 2021.

2021 Open Short Story Competition with Helen Baggott (weebly.com)

Winner

Strawberry or chocolate chip? by Vivienne Moles wins our prize of £10

Shortlisted Poetry

S Bavishya - That summer, I knew
Daphne Clark – Summer 1950
Mary Hodges – Holiday romance revisited
Liz Verlander - Blue Coat

Shortlisted 500 words

Christina Collins – Love in a spin
Sharon Haston – Love in a shopping trolley
Andrew Taylor - Blind Date
DJ Tyrer – Not what she’d imagined

COURSE AND FESTIVE FRIGHT ANNOUNCEMENT - 5th April 2021

4/4/2021

Thank you to all entrants to this competition and for your patience in awaiting our announcement of a winner. We were delighted to receive an enormous amount of entries for both the COURSE and the FESTIVE FRIGHT competitions. We were pleased to note such diversity in the content of your entries although this meant choosing a winner was not an easy process.

Our apologies for the late announcement but we have had issues over the last year. Some of our readers have been affected by the Covid pandemic and this has then caused problems with the management of our competitions. As many of you are aware, all our readers are volunteers and we would not be able to provide free competitions if they weren’t.

The winner of the COURSE competition has been notified and we’re awaiting their response before we publish. There were several entries worthy of being shortlisted for the COURSE competition but for our free entry comps, as we can only have one winner, we think this one stood out over and above the rest.

Unfortunately, we have been unable to pick a winner for the FESTIVE FRIGHT competition. One reason for this is because we had a requirement which was not met, ie: ‘Set it during the festive season in December.’

Only a handful of entries did this correctly.

Another requirement of this competition was to ‘put the frighteners on us to win this competition’. Of the entries that did this we could see hardly any, in some cases none at all, bearing to the festive season or even that the story was set in December. A few entries came close but not close enough to be awarded as our winner.

Please keep an eye on our website as we will be providing more free entry comps later in the year.

We still have one more free entry competition open currently and we are now on track to announce the result for this competition on time:

Comp Name: THEMED FREE ENTRY WRITING COMPETITION - A HOLIDAY ROMANCE

Closing date: Thursday 27th May 2021

Prize: £10

Brief:   We're inviting you to write about a holiday romance. You may want to write about a holiday romance that has yet to happen, or possibly one currently happening. It could be your writing is a memory of a holiday romance from the past.
Entry fee: None
Website:  https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/2021-free-entry-holiday-romance-themed-writing-competition.html

We also have our annual Open Short Story Competition inviting entries:

Name of comp: OPEN SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2021
Judged by Helen Baggott

Close date: Thursday 22nd July 2021

Prizes:   Six prizes to be awarded:
£100 First, £70 Second, £30 Third
two 'Highly Commended' each win 2022 comp free entry
and a charitable donation will be made*

Brief: Short story. There is no theme for this competition, you can write anything you like.

   No minimum word count, maximum 2,500 words.

Entry fee:   £3.00 for one entry,  £5.00 for two, £2.50 thereon

Website: https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/2021-open-short-story-competition-with-helen-baggott.html

We're back - August 2020

8/17/2020

Hello, it's great to be back! Please follow this link to find information about the competitions we are inviting you to enter:

https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/competitions.html

As well as giving the website an update, we have updated our name to Erewash Writing Competition.

More information about this here
https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/about-us2.html

RESULTS FOR OPEN SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2018

11/28/2018

Thank you to all entrants for submitting stories to our competition.

We received many, many excellent stories and as usual, it was difficult to pick out
only a few as winners.

First place wins £100 - Taria Karillion - Attempt 67
Second place wins £70 - Evan Guildford-Blake - Absence
Third place wins £30 - Bruce Harris - Paris by Night

Two entrants were awarded a highly commended place and each win a free entry to the Open Short Story Competition 2019:
Ellen Evers - Dear Reader
Shirley Cook - Turf Magic.

Helen Laycock has very kindly provided a report about judging our competition.

Reading and judging the wonderful selection of short stories made me ask myself what it is that makes a winner. It’s not just the idea; great ideas only work if other factors fall into place:

Because stories are short, every single section must work to earn its place and keep the reader engaged. And once a reader is absorbed, it’s very important to keep them there; ideally, they should become unaware that they are involved in the process of reading. What should be a seamless experience can be marred by such issues as confusion, i.e. needing to re-read a sentence, unnatural dialogue, inability to picture a scene or believe in a character, lack of variety in sentence structure and, of course, basic errors in spelling or punctuation.

A really satisfying story is one where you feel as though you are not just eavesdropping on real events for real people, but almost personally experiencing the emotions that the characters feel, inhabiting their world. As far as setting, specifics are important, for example, ‘an oak’ is more visual than ‘a tree’. And as you hurtle towards the ending, it’s great to have that final punch, such as something unexpected and clever. A story which has cyclical properties, resonating the beginning, always feels thorough and complete.

If you wish to find out more about Helen Laycock:

@helen_laycock
https://www.facebook.com/helenlaycockauthor/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Helen-Laycock/e/B006PGFVL6

Winning stories can be read here, along with comments from Helen Laycock
https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/winners-2018-open-short-story-competition-with-helen-laycock.html

The following entrants reached our longlist:

Gillian Brown
Kevin Chant
John Glander
Sarah Haselwood
Peter Hilton
Jeff Jones
Elinor Lobban
Gwenda Major
Emma Myatt
Julia Thorley
Jim Waite
Charles Warren
Brian Webster
Barbara Young

Well done everybody and thank you all for submitting your work to our competition. News will be available early in 2019 about further competitions.

https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/2019-free-entry-500-word-themed-writing-competition.html

Kind regards,
Debbie

November 28th, 2018

11/28/2018

Longlist for Open Short Story Competition with Helen Laycock

11/28/2018

Thank you to all entrants for submitting stories to our competition.

We received many, many excellent stories and as usual, it was difficult to pick out
only a few as winners.

The following entrants reached our longlist (shortlist and winners to be announced later this evening):

Gillian Brown
Kevin Chant
Shirley Cook
Ellen Evers
John Glander
Evan Guildford-Blake
Bruce Harris
Sarah Haselwood
Peter Hilton
Jeff Jones
Elinor Lobban
Gwenda Major
Emma Myatt
Taria Killion
Julia Thorley
Jim Waite
Charles Warren
Brian Webster
Barbara Young

I'll be back!

Regards,
Debbie

Winners to Themed Free Entry Comps

9/4/2018

Thanks to all for entering our competitions.

Winning entries to free entry 'Live in the Moment' competition

Bryan Thomas - Intermezzo
Vanessa Winn - The Revolving Door

Winning entries to free entry 'Summer Garden' competition

As we were unable to find a short story winner we have awarded follows:

Poetry - Lyne Barnes
Flash - Alyson Hilbourne
Flash - DJ Tyrer

Entries to be published later this evening.

Apologies for delays.

We are currently inviting entries to our Open Short Story Competition 2018. All entrants to this competition will have their names put into a hat and one drawn early next year to win a free entry to our 2019 competition.

https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/2018-open-short-story-competition-with-helen-laycock.html

Many thanks for your interest in our competitions.

Keep writing!

Kind regards,
Debbie

Announcement - New email address as from May 2018

5/10/2018

Hello to all.

　
We have been experiencing problems with access to our website over recent months. That has now been sorted out. We are in the process of publishing the winning stories of our Open Short Story Competition 2017 to the website and this will be completed over the next couple of weeks.

　

Our email address as at 10th May 2018 is erewashwriterscomps at hotmail.co.uk

We are in the process of moving to erewashwriterscomps2 at gmail.com Please send your entries to our new address. We will still be visiting our old address up to the end of May 2018. After that date we will no longer be using it.

Please be assured if you have sent an email to our former address by today's date we have received it.

　
If you have sent an entry to either or both of our two free competitions, or to our
Open Short Story Competition 2018, and you are wating for receipt of entry confirmation, this will be with you by end of next week. If the unlikely event you
have not received confirmation by then, please email us on

[email protected]

We are going to announce the result for both free entry competitions in August 2018.
If you have sent an entry to the 'Live in the Moment' competition, the result will be announced the same time as the result to the 'Summer Garden' competition. We apologise for the delay which is because of reasons beyond our control.

Current competitions open to entry are

https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/2018-open-short-story-competition-with-helen-laycock.html

　
https://erewashwriterscompetition.weebly.com/2018-free-entry-themed-writing-competition.html

　
We look forward to reading you soon.

　
Kind regards,

Debbie