9/15/2014

Hummingbird Prize! Hurrah!

I'm very pleased to announce that my story "Here I Lay Down My Heart" has won PULP Literature's 2014 Hummingbird Prize for Flash Fiction!

The story is set in Tanzania ("Here I Lay Down My Heart" is one of the many translations out there for Bagamoyo, a coastal Tanzanian town), and is part of a larger series of stories set in Africa which I have been writing feverishly (i.e. very slowly by anyone else's standards) over the last couple years.

I've only just started sending those stories out for publication, and when this one is published in PULP's Winter 2015 issue, it will be my first fiction publication. Not a bad way to kick things off!

I'm thrilled to have won, of course, and also to be in good company (friend-of-silaron Daniela Elza was the runner up). And I'm honoured to have caught the attention of contest judge JJ Lee, who said of the piece:

"On the strength of its setting, naturalism, and the pleasure it takes in the search for language, ‘Here I Lay Down My Heart’ wins the Hummingbird Flash Fiction contest. Its author has created a small gem about a nighttime boat trip and a missing child. The author avoids sloppy dialogue and needless back story and, in less than 600 words, crafts a compelling tale which readers will rush to reach to the end.”

Thank you again to the editors at PULP, and to JJ Lee, for making this possible!

1 comment:

daniela elza said...

congratulations Rob! very much looking forward to reading it.