Results

We are delighted to announce the winner and runners up for the first Philip Hoare Prize for Non-Fiction.

Winner: ‘Hopeful Glimmer’ by Jupiter Jones.

Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the two-time winner of the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Prize and her work has been published by Aesthetica, Amphibia, Fish, Parthian etc. She is the author of three novellas-in-flash, including Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Being a proper nerd with very little social life, she is currently working on a PhD on the novella-in-flash but has wasted most of the summer watching wasps eat all the pears.

Here’s what she had to say:

“I am utterly delighted to receive the inaugural Philip Hoare prize. Every endorsement of a writer’s work is valued, and they really don’t come much better than this – so a huge thank you to the readers and judges for selecting ‘Hopeful Glimmer’. Flash non-fiction, though pocket sized, can carry enormous ideas and can materialise as many different things: memoir, lyric essay, review, polemic, thought piece, biography, anecdote, travelogue or reportage, etc. It’s an exciting form with huge potential, and it’s a curious thing that we can only define it by what it’s not.”

Runner up: ‘PROPHETIC SNAILLES’ by Amy K Grandvoinet

Amy K Grandvoinet is currently enduring a PhD in so-called literary psychogeographies and split-hails from multiple coastal quarters across Wales & England. Her variably-moded outputs on themes of spatio-oriented alienation have appeared in Worms, Folding Rock, The London Magazine, Culture Matters, & elsewhere, she’s worked with the British School at Roma and the Samuel Beckett Research Centre, is co-founder of think.material Press, & will teach autoethnographic writing in Liverpool next academic annum. Plîs see amygrandvoi.net and/or go to @amykgrandvoinet thank-u.

Third place: ‘Fog is the breath of the river’ by Eluned Summers-Bremner

Eluned Summers-Bremner is the author of Insomnia: A Cultural History, translated into six languages, Astray: A History of Wandering and many other, mostly shorter, publications. A former academic, she grew up in the Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand and works as a writer and editor. Her first years in academia were enabled by the shared life of an inner-city commune that was once a Catholic school attended by Princess Te Puea Hērangi. Te Puea was key to reviving the Kiingitanga (Māori King) movement at Tūrangawaewae in the Waikato, on which the Crown’s invasion of the region was ostensibly based.

Congratulations to these writers, and to the other shortlisted entrants.

‘The Drift’ by Robin Koczerginski

‘House on Fire’ by Miriam Kotorova

‘Smoke’ by Françoise Thornton-Smith

‘When My Accent Betrayed Me’ by Laura Hidengwa

‘Amyke’ by Anya Reeve

‘Red Bean Soup’ by Jessie Lau

‘A Path Goes Both Ways’ by John Frew

‘The Cottage in the Woods’ by Matthew Sperling

If you would like to read the top three stories, and Philip Hoare’s comments, please click on their titles.