This contest is closed, and the results were declared at the David Sassoon Library Garden on the 10th February, 2007. You can view the winning entries here, and the complete scoresheets here.

Flash Fiction (also called micro-fiction or short-shorts) presents a simple challenge: tell a story with all the classical elements: a beginning, middle and end, a conflict and resolution, a credible protagonist.. but do so in a very limited number of words. Fire up your favourite web search engine. There are plenty of tutorials and guidelines available online, as well as excellent examples of the genre.

See last year’s shortlist here, and the scoresheet here.

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How to enter

[Entries to this contest are now closed. We hope to see you next year.]

Important note on submissions (added on 29th January, 2007): Please do not put any personally identifying information in the body of your entry. By this we mean no byline, signature, credit line, copyright notice or symbol. If you have filled out the fields for name, email address and phone number, never fear, your entry is linked to that data by the system. The body of your entry is all our jury will see, and all that they want to see. Entries that ignore this will be seen to be trying to influence the jury, and will be disqualified.

Deadline

Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 4th February, 2007.

Rules and Conditions

The contest is open to anyone, anywhere, with the exception of the jury.

Entries must be in English

Entries must be not more than 300 words long.

Entries must be your own, original work, and previously unpublished anywhere, in print or online. (We interpret “published” to mean that there was some form of editorial or jury selection and/or payment involved. So work that appeared on a personal blog or unmoderated forum is okay, but something that won you a prize somewhere is not. Something that may have been selected to be printed in a newspaper is published, whether you got paid for it or not.)

Multiple entries are permitted.

There is no entry fee.

Stories submitted remain the intellectual property of the authors, but by submitting an entry, you give the Organisers and Sponsors permission to use your entry, with no payment to you, in the Festival Blog, and as part of Press Releases (where they may be reproduced by media organisations), and in a possible special booklet featuring the best of the Festival.

The decisions of the jury are final and binding, and no correspondence will be entertained regarding the jury’s decisions.

Jury

Caferati’s editors will screen the initial entries to keep the long list to a reasonable number. In the second round of judging, they will be joined by:

Urvashi Butalia is co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house and now Director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali. She has been active in the women’s movement in India for several years. She writes regularly for newspapers and magazines, and among her published books are the award-winning The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir (edited), Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays (edited) and several collections of short stories. She has also been on the juries of the Crossword Book Awards and on the Lettre Ulysses award.

Sonia Faleiro is a Mumbai-based writer and journalist. She’s the author of The Girl (Viking, 2006), and the short stories Stupid (Penguin Anthology of New Writing 2, 2006) and Outkast D’Souza (Reflected in Water, Writings on Goa, Penguin, 2006). She is an awardee of the CNN Young Journalist of the Year 2006 award, and is currently writing her second book, a non-fiction account of the lives of Mumbai’s dance bar girls. For more information, visit soniafaleiro.com.

Naresh Fernandes is editor of Time Out Mumbai, a fortnightly city, arts and culture magazine. He’s the co-editor, with Jerry Pinto, of Bombay Meri Jaan, a collection of writing about India’s only real city. As a journalist, he’s written about socialism in Cuba, immigration in Belgium and low-rider jeans in Italy.

Nilanjana S Roy is a literary columnist. She is starting a new imprint with Landmark Books. Nilanjana lives in Delhi, with her husband and three cats.

Altaf Tyrewala is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel No God In Sight (Penguin).

Prizes

Prizes worth approximately Rs 3000, Rs 2000, and Rs 1000 to be won, sponsored by [to be announced].

Winners will be announced on the evening of 10th February, 2007, at the David Sasson Library Garden. Exact time will be confirmed.

Winning entries will be featured on the Festival Blog.

Updates

All updates via the Caferati Contests newsgroup. Please make sure you’re subscribed.