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.
This contest kindly sponsored by Sulekha Blogs. Please go visit them.
Flash Fiction is now in its third year at the Kala Ghoda contests.
Theme
Tall story
How to enter
Go to the entry form. (But puhleeze make sure you read the entire page here first.)
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), 3rd February, 2008.
Rules and Conditions
The contest is open to anyone, anywhere, with the exception of the jury and their immediate families.
Note, however, that you must have a bank account and mailing address in India, or, if you win, be able to nominate someone in India to receive your prize.
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Entries must be your own, original work, and previously unpublished anywhere, in print or online.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. Do not duplicate entries, however. We will delete all copies of your entry from the system if you flood it.
There is no entry fee.
Submissions remain the intellectual property of the entrants, but by submitting an entry, you give the the Kala Ghoda Association, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival and its Sponsors, and Caferati permission to use your entry, with acknowledgement, but with no payment to you, in their websites, as part of Press Releases (where they may be reproduced by media organisations), and in a possible special booklet or CD 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:
Sayoni Basu has been working in publishing for many years while she tries to decide what she is going to serve at the restaurant she will eventually open in Goa. Educated in Calcutta and Oxford, she is currently the publishing director at Scholastic India.
Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian author whose work has appeared in various publications. His first book, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was a thirteen-part story cycle that was translated into nine languages and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Hutch Crossword Book Award. He is currently working on his second book, a novel about the history of day-dreams of Bulgaria.
Ruchir Joshi is an independent film-maker and writer based in New Delhi. Among Joshi’s films are Eleven Miles, a feature-length documentary made with the Baul folk musicians of Bengal, Memories of Milk City, a short meditation on Ahmedabad, and Tales from Planet Kolkata, an essay-film that takes a look at how the north-by-northwestern media projects its bizarre constructions upon his home city of Calcutta. Eleven Miles was awarded the Prix Joris Ivens award at Cinema du Reel, Paris, Milk City, the Main Prize at Oberhausen Film festival, and Planet Kolktata the FICCI prize at Oberhausen and a special jury award at Mannheim. Common between all these films is an edgy visual richness and a zany sense of humour which, ironically, helps bring out the tragedies and absurdities of contemporary Indian urban existence. Parallel to his film work, Joshi has been an essayist and columnist for leading Indian print media for over twenty years, where he has examined issues of culture, politics and sport. His first novel, The Last Jet-engine Laugh, was published in 2001 to critical acclaim both in India and in Britain. The collaged saga of three generations of an Indian middle-class family spans from 1930 to 2030. The book has been translated in Dutch, and this year published in French by Fayard as Le Dernier Rire du Moteur d’Avion.
Ambarish Satwik was born in 1976 in Nagpur and grew up in New Delhi. He is presently working in the department of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi. He started out with verse, some of which was published in the Indian literary miscellany Civil Lines, but that has been largely abandoned in favour of rogue and deviant historical fiction. His first book of fiction, Perineum: nether parts of the Empire was published by Penguin India in May 2007.
Prizes
Prizes worth approximately Rs 3000, Rs 2000, and Rs 1000 to be won.
Winners will be announced on the evening of 10th February, 2007, at the David Sasson Library Garden. Exact time will be confirmed.
Updates
All updates via the Caferati Contests newsgroup. Please make sure you’re subscribed.
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