LONGLIST: Short Story Competition 2024

19th March 2024
Blog
3 min read
Edited
20th March 2024
Longlist

Our 2024  Writers' and Artists' Short Story Competition longlist is officially out!

Every year Writers & Artists hold a short story competition which is free to enter and offers writers the chance to win great prizes and see their story published on our site. This year all entrants were in with a chance of winning a place on an Arvon Foundation Writing Retreat (worth £850). Arvon host residential writing courses in rural writing houses across the UK. Their courses offer the writers the chance to live alongside fellow writers for a week, and transform their writing through one-to-one tutorials, workshops and the time and space to dedicate to their writing.

To be in with a chance of winning, our 2024 competition called for stories under 2,000 words on the theme of ‘risk’.

And today we are really excited to be announcing our longlist. We had 699 entries and to narrow it down to this list of 14 was an incredibly difficult task. We were so impressed by the standard of writing, the many different approaches to the theme and the creativity apparent in so many of the stories we received. But we had to make our decisions, and here they are!

Congratulations to the following writers:

An Imitation by Holly Isard

Bone Broth by Megan Jones

Scrimshaw by RJ Franz

Life Drawing by Alice Goodrich

Sand and Spinach by Anne Aylor

Service by Lauren Archer

Old Bones by Perdita Stott

103 Hale Street by Rosa Chalfen

Bacon by Shereen Jackson

Where Did You Go? by Lia Martin

The Eel Catcher's Daughter by Martha Lane 

Limerence by Sam Rennie

A Little Less M&S by Genevieve Daly

My First Time by Johnathan Reid

This year’s judge Kirsty Logan, author of Now She is Witch, Things We Say in The Dark and The Unfamiliar, will announce our shortlist and choose a winner. As we are working to quite a tight timeframe, we will announce the shortlist and also reveal with the winning entry in a single blog post on the site at the beginning of April.

Once again, many congratulations to those writers who have been longlisted and a thank you to everyone who entered. It has been a pleasure to review your work.

Writing stage

Comments