The QuietManDave Prize celebrates short-form writing and the life of someone who loved to experience new places, art and events and write about them.

The QuietManDave Prize, honouring theatre critic and writer Dave Murray, is now open for entries for its 2024 edition, encouraging submissions in all forms of writing. Writers are invited to submit flash fiction and non-fiction entries until Friday 25th October, 2024.

The prize aims to encourage short-form writing with no limitations on style or form, offering two £1,000 prizes for the flash fiction and flash non-fiction categories, as well as additional runner-up prizes for each category.

This year’s prize will be judged by Catherine Love-Smith, lecturer in Theatre at the University of York; Mufaro Makubika, playwright and winner of the Alfred Fagon Award for Best New Play in 2017; and writer and theatre-maker Michael Pinchbeck, who co-founded Metro-Boulot-Dodo theatre company in 1997.

aAh! speaks to prize judge Catherine Love-Smith to see what the judges are looking for this year.

What do you like most about the prize?

“I love the openness of the prize and the variety of different submissions that it invites. While there are quite a lot of flash fiction prizes out there, flash non-fiction is a form that is not often celebrated in this way, but it’s a category that can include such a wide variety of subjects and approaches. Both categories combine almost endless possibilities with the creative constraint of a short word limit in a way that enables people to do really interesting, imaginative and original work.”

What makes the difference for you between reading a submission that’s very good and one that is a ‘winning’ entry?

I think it’s hard to define that difference in the abstract before reading any entries. Because there are so many different ways of approaching the two categories, I’m sure that I will be surprised by the submissions and that people will come up with responses that I could never have anticipated. But to attempt an answer to that question, I think it probably has something to do with the marriage between the subject matter, the use of form and the quality of the writing on a sentence-by-sentence level. While many submissions will excel in one or two of those areas, I expect the best entries to combine a striking topic with formally creative and stylistically skilful writing.

The criteria specifies short form writing with no limitations, is anything in particular you are looking for or enjoy reading?

Because of that lack of limitations, I’m trying to approach the judging process with an open mind. While I have my own personal interests, I’m just as keen to read about topics that I’m completely unfamiliar with. The thing I’m most looking forward to is being surprised!

What do you think individuals new to writing or publishing their writing should submit to QuietManDave?

Whether you’re a new or experienced writer and whether you usually write short-form or long-form pieces, this prize is an excellent way to exercise your writing muscles. There’s a specific discipline to writing within a tight word limit that I think can help any writer to develop their craft. It’s also a chance to get your writing out there, with the possibility of wider recognition for your work. So I’d urge writers to be brave and give it a go.

What advice would you give to short form writers?

I think the most important thing with both flash fiction and flash non-fiction is to attend to the specificity of the form. Short-form writing is very different to long-form writing and it demands a different approach to things like structure. So don’t just try to write a miniature version of a longer story or non-fiction piece! To that end, I would advise writers to read lots of other short-form work, to get a sense of the possibilities within the form (the shortlisted entries from previous years of the prize are a great place to start). But there’s also room, of course, to be creative and subvert aspects of that form in a playful way.

Are there any writers you’re reading at the moment, short form writers you are inspired by?

Her stories are generally longer than 500 words, but I love the short fiction of Lucy Caldwell. She regularly uses the second person (‘you’) in her stories, which is quite unusual, so I would recommend her work to anyone who’s interested in playing around with narrative perspective in fiction. There are also some brilliant, very short stories in Jon McGregor’s collection This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, which show how much you can do even with just one sentence. And then one of the absolute masters of flash fiction is Lydia Davis, who manages to work miracles within the shortest of word counts. As for short-form non-fiction, I always love reading reviews (perhaps unsurprisingly, as a reviewer myself!) and would recommend dipping into the arts pages of newspapers to see the range of approaches that different writers take to the review form.

For more information about the prize and to enter, visit mmu.ac.uk/qmdprize. The competition closes at 5pm (UK time) on Friday 25th October, 2024