2024 First Chapter Comp – Longlist

Many thanks to everyone who submitted their novel opening this year. We have been transported into many different lives all around the world, and beyond our own planet.

Congratulations to the writers who have made the longlist. The novel titles are shown below – please don’t tell which is yours though as we are reading anonymously.

Longlist

  • A Beehive Heart
  • A More Onerous Citizenship
  • After Us, Them
  • Birdie of the Wheatsheaf
  • Bitter Seed
  • Delusion
  • Dwell
  • Echoes of Beirut
  • Everything is Wrong
  • Everywhen and the Dark Entanglement
  • Forced Perspective
  • Frankie
  • Going Places
  • Moon Bone
  • Nine Rooms
  • Peter Heggarty Goes Around and Around
  • Red
  • Singleton
  • Sleepwalking
  • Somnia
  • Splinters from Boxes
  • Swimming in the Dark
  • The Annihilation Era
  • The Blooding of Amelia Sharp
  • The Contrabandist
  • The Devil in Bangkok
  • The Integration Protocol
  • The Law of Kindness
  • The Possibility of Us
  • The Price
  • The Ritual
  • The Root that Binds
  • When the Sea Became the Sky
  • White Death
  • Who Will Save Us

Good luck for the next round everyone! We will now choose our shortlist of 10, which will be sent to our literary agent judge, Eli Keren, to choose the winners from.

In the meantime, from very long stories to very short! The WestWord Prize Micro Fiction Category, judged by Tania Hershman, closes this month! Info here.

Monthly Micro Feb 2024 Winners

Well done to all who made it through to the final round of this month’s micro contest. The theme was LEAVES and we loved all of the shortlisted stories. It’s so hard to choose the final winners! But choose we have to so congratulations to the following writers!

NEWS! We have an announcement about this competition…from next month onwards the stories will now be published in WestWord, our online literary magazine. We can reach more readers that way and it also looks swisher. Plus, we are in the process of migrating the Retreat West website to a new home where the community, courses and website will all be in one place so it makes sense to make this change for this competition at this time so all the stories we are publishing online are all in one place.


First place: The Silence of the Leaves by Isabelle Hichens

Why we chose it: Really different take on the theme and we loved the way it shows how easy it is to misunderstand when we make assumptions.

Second place and People’s Prize: In This Version…by Fiona Dignan

Why we chose it: Great structure and really poignant tale of loss in reverse.


Shortlisted Stories


Isabelle and Fiona win the cash prizes and Fiona also win one free entry to each category of the WestWord Prize in 2024. The first category is Micro Fiction and the deadline is next month.

And the deadline for the first ever WestWord Hermit Crab Prize is just 2 days away! You have until 23.59 GMT on 29th February to send your stories.

Plus, if you want to get writing and learning about all things tiny stories, then our 6th Online Flash Fest is this weekend! Info and tickets here.

The Silence of the Leaves

Isabelle Hichens

They look at my painting and see so much in it. Their voices fill the room with vacant clichés. Their eyes are gleaming, they’re holding the truth, they know me. In the soft rounded teeth of the edges, they say they see the fragility of the lives I carried inside me. They say that the two shapes are hugging,united forever. They say the colours are so telling. The yellowing tones, the blemished hues show untimely decay. In those yellow strokes, they hear my tears. Yet, the shades of green show youth. They say I’ll be ok because green is the colour of hope. They say painting that picture was therapeutic for me. And then, there are the grey, broken contorted stalks. They say those show how they were cut off from me. They think the dark red pot is my womb, that place that was not good enough for my baby twins to grow. They think they see so much. But I just wanted to paint the portrait of two leaves in a pot. 


This story won First Prize in the February 2024 Monthly Micro contest.

Author: Isabelle lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and three children. She teaches French and Spanish in a lovely school. She loves stories, reading them and writing them.

Image by Jinali Parikh from Pixabay

In this version…

Fiona Dignan

The ashes gust together, gathering into the urn. My hands clutch back the children’s grasp. We walk back through the formalities; hymns choke down our throats. You unburn. We get back into the car, go back into the house, where I shed black clothes like snake’s skin. The children crumple back to foetal positions in their beds.

Two weeks follow, like the blankness of snow.  Interspersed with implosions of grief. That still must happen, even in this version. But grief is only love with no place to go. In this version, the love is poured back in. Tears crawl up to our eyes. Our cheeks’ riverbeds evaporate. I hand back casseroles to our neighbours. The well-wishers eat their words.

The policewoman dribbles her tea into the cup. Her pitying face transforms to poker, as she returns to the doorstep. Knocks absorb into her knuckles. And you backpedal. Backpedal. Please Backpedal. Come back through the door. Peel off your cycling gloves. Suck a kiss from my lips. Swallow your vow of going for a quick ride.


This story won Second Prize and the People’s Prize in the February 2024 Monthly Micro contest.

Author: Fi Dignan writes short stories, poetry, flash and microfiction inspired by her experience of motherhood, place and identity. She won The London Society poetry prize (2023), the Plaza Prize for Sudden Fiction (2023) and was a finalist in the London Independent Story Prize (2023).

Six Encyclopaedic Facts About Black Holes

Fiona Dignan

  • Black holes form at the end of stars’ lives.

Her life was 2 days 6 hours 46 minutes and 7 seconds. 

  • Gravity near the core of a black hole approaches infinity. This theoretically suggests infinite curvature of spacetime.

If I continue to refine her lifespan into milliseconds, nanoseconds etc, I could divide time infinitely. Does this theoretically suggest I could keep her alive indefinitely?

  • Black holes are huge concentrations of matter packed into tiny spaces.

Like a premature baby. Like the baby-shaped hole she leaves.

  • The gravitational influence of a black hole distorts spacetime. The closer you get to a black hole, reality as we know it, breaks down.

[See entry for grief]

  • Although black holes are theoretically infinite, quantum physics propose they emit thermal radiation and thus eventually shrink over astronomical timescales.

Time can be a healer, and this is both true and untrue. (Another quantum paradox?)

  • Black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood.

[See entries for love, grief, motherhood]


Author: Fi Dignan writes short stories, poetry, flash and microfiction inspired by her experience of motherhood, place and identity. She won The London Society poetry prize (2023), the Plaza Prize for Sudden Fiction (2023) and was a finalist in the London Independent Story Prize (2023).

How We Will Leave

Anne Howkins

We will depart in triumphant glory, revelling in our bronzed age, soaring away like the horse-chestnut leaves and sycamore seeds blowing down the street, leaving the deep-rooted security of constancy for the unknown.

We will be scattered by our grandchildren chasing errant Labradors through the park-keepers crisp piles of gold and red and brown, 

We will evaporate in next door’s bonfire, blazing under rimy starlight, our glowing embers fading into the night. 

We will disappear in a gentle rotting away, our fabric absorbed by our resting place.

Whichever way we leave, remember us. 


Author: Anne relishes the challenge of writing very short stories and has started writing again after a two year break. Her stories have appeared in print and online, at Retreat West, Flash 500, Reflex Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, National Flash Fiction Day, Lunate, Strands International and Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2020.