Winners/Highly Commended
Latest Winner
Fat Woman Seen
By Valerie Bowes
O why do you walk through the field in gloves
My hands are bad today. The gloves are a necessity not a fashion statement, although I have to say, I do like them. Not many people do, these days, but my mother rarely left the house without putting on her hat and gloves and my grandmother never did. Not even to pop across the road to see her sister, half a dozen doors down. She said you weren’t dressed without them. You might as well be wearing no knickers . . .
Runners-Up
by Ed Walsh
They have not met before. But when they clink their glasses in Cecile’s Bar at two-thirty in the afternoon they know that they will for a while be connected, and for a shorter while will give hope to one another. Before stepping down from their bar stools she will tell him about her marriage that didn’t get past the first year . . .
The Judge and the Plastic Surgeon
By Amanda Sheridan
Tightly squeezed into a black polyester M&S suit the woman was a conspicuously overachieving lawyer; the man was a frantic registrar in a sweaty hospital, white-coatedly dashing about. An unlikely couple, she was tall and bristling, he was short and smooth . . .
