Ghost Story Competition 2015: The Winners

It feels slightly strange to be doing this in the spring, with the sun shining and everything feeling so lively and pleasant, but it’s time to announce the winners of our 2015 Ghost Story Competition.

We received a great batch of entries this year, and to acknowledge this we’re going to announce a shortlist as well as our three winners. All of the shortlisted writers will receive a year’s subscription to our anthology series, and the three winners will appear in an upcoming Fiction Desk anthology.

Let’s start with the complete list of shortlisted stories:

My Body Upstairs by Frank Babics
Poor Billy by Alex Clark
One Green Bottle by Leah Eades
Mrs Dabrowski by Gilli Fryzer
Things in the Dead Space by Jo Gatford
Soup — Condensed by Anabel Graff
Laptops and Coffin Lids by Sara Kellow
Every Ghost Story is a Love Story by Vera Kurian
A Rooted Sorrow by Norma Levinson
Sing Me No Sad Songs by Amanda Mason
Home Solutions for Mould by S R Mastrantone
Jonathan by Louis Rakovich
The Fowling Piece by Stephanie Shaw

And now for the winners, in reverse order:

In third place (£100): Poor Billy by Alex Clark

In second place (£250): Home Solutions for Mould by S R Mastrantone

And the winner of the 2015 Fiction Desk ghost story competition, in first place (£500): Soup — Condensed by Anabel Graff

Congratulations to all of the above, and thank you all for sending in such great stories and making my job very difficult. I’ll be getting in touch over the coming weeks to arrange the shortlistees’ subscriptions and winners’ prizes.

Now a little bad news (or good news, depending on your tastes): we won’t be doing a dedicated ghost story anthology this year. Thanks to our slightly erratic “when it’s ready” publication schedule, we’ve swung quite heavily in the direction of supernatural fiction lately, with two of our last three anthologies being dedicated to it, and we do need to rebalance that a little. It also strikes me that it’s a bit odd to try breaking down genre barriers by bringing in ghost stories, only to then segregate them into their own volumes.

As a result, the above three winners will be appearing in one of our regular, mixed-genre anthologies, which should benefit both the volume they grace, and those among our subscribers who prefer their ghosts as part of a more balanced literary diet.

The Fiction Desk Ghost Story Competition will reopen for entries at the end of this year. Our Flash Fiction Competition is open now, and runs until the end of May.