It’s time to reveal the winner of the Writers’ Award for our latest anthology, New Ghost Stories III.

The Fiction Desk Writers’ Award isn’t like the other competitions we run from time to time: it’s awarded to the best story in each anthology we publish, and is voted for by the contributors to that anthology. It’s a great way to get the writers’ own view on their peers’ work, and it’s always a close race. There’s also £100 for the winner.

This time around the award goes to Will Dunn, for his story Des Nuits Blanches. Congratulations, Will!

New Ghost Stories III, featuring Will’s story and six other fine tales of the supernatural, is available now in paperback: you can get your copy right here. The 2018 edition of our Ghost Story Competition is open now for entries. See details over in our submission section.

The 2018 edition of the Fiction Desk Ghost Story Competition is now open for entries. This year there’s a first prize of £500, along with second and third prizes. Entry costs £8, and the closing date is Wednesday, 31st January 2018. (The competition closes at midnight UK time, so don’t get caught out if you’re sending an entry from overseas.)

The main page of the competition can be found right here. Full terms of entry can be found at the bottom of our online entry form.

Winners from the last two years appear in our latest anthology, New Ghost Stories III. It’s well worth picking up a copy if you want to see the stories that have been successful in the past – or if you just want a good spooky read to get you through the winter nights…

Copies of our latest anthology are available now. New Ghost Stories III contains seven substantial tales of the supernatural, including the winners of our last two ghost story competitions. The contributors are Amanda Mason, Barney Walsh, Seth Marlin, Jerry Ibbotson, Philippa East, Richard Agemo, and Will Dunn.

If you’re a subscriber or pre-ordered your copy, you should have already received it. If not, you can order your copy now directly from us right here. You can also take out a subscription to include this volume.

It’s time to announce the winners of this year’s Newcomer Prize for Short Stories.

The standard of entries to our competitions is always high. People send in their best work, and judging the entries is as rewarding as it is challenging. Getting the entries down to a shortlist of ten stories was tricky, and picking two winners nearly impossible. But we’re short story publishers: we’re used to doing the impossible.

And so, here are the winners and shortlist of this year’s prize. First, our shortlist of ten stories. All of the writers below will receive a selection of paperback Fiction Desk anthologies through the post:

• Three More Days by Gayle Andrews
• The Bus Stop by Becky Carnaffin
• Uncle Dougie’s Suitcase by Alastair Chisholm
• The Insurance Policy by Christine Grant
• Not Waving, But… by Maureen Hanrahan
• All Washed Up by Chris Hogben
• The Black Squirrel by Christopher Howard
• Tool by Mac McCaskill
• Recalculating Route by Mat Osman
• Not Like Us by Sherri Turner

And now our two winners:

In second place, with a prize of £250:

• All Washed Up by Chris Hogben

In first place, with a prize of £500:

• Uncle Dougie’s Suitcase by Alastair Chisholm

So congratulations to all of the above, and thank you to everybody who took part in the competition. This year’s winners will be appearing in our twelfth anthology, due early in 2018.

The Newcomer Prize will open again for entries next year, but if you fancy trying your hand at very short stories, our flash fiction competition is open now. You’ll find details of that one over in our submissions section.

After taking a break for 2016, we’re delighted to announce that our annual Flash Fiction Competition is back for 2017 — and open now for entries!

This year we have a first prize of £300 and two runner-up prizes of £100. The entry fee for one story is £5, or you can enter two stories together for the special rate of £8.

The deadline is midnight (UK time) on Friday, 29th September. For full details, including our online entry form, head over to our submissions section.

Today I’m very pleased to be announcing the winners and shortlist of our 2017 Ghost Story Competition.

Judging this competition is one of the great pleasures of working with The Fiction Desk, and this year’s entries have been very strong indeed, possibly the strongest to date.

As usual we’ll start with the shortlist. All of these authors will receive a three-volume subscription to our anthology series:

• Richard Agemo: The House Friends
• Jacqueline Burgoyne: Borrowed
• Alastair Chisholm: Exhalation
• Amanda Crum: The Body Farm
• Will Dunn: Des Nuits Blanches
• Philippa East: The Archivist
• Randi Berg Ferstad: Benjamin
• Amanda Mason: When the Dark Comes Down
• Henry Peplow: Take Me Home
• Victoria Richards: The Camera
• Darren Todd: What Meets in the Dark and Rain
• Christopher Youds: The Reclaiming

And now the winners:

• In first place (£500 prize): Will Dunn: Des Nuits Blanches
• In second place (£250 prize): Philippa East: The Archivist
• In third place (£100 prize): Richard Agemo: The House Friends

Congratulations to all of the above writers. Again, it’s been a particularly strong year for entries. We’ll be putting the winners of this year’s competition together with the 2016 winners and a selection of other stories in our next anthology, New Ghost Stories III.

The next edition of our ghost story competition will open for entries in November 2017. Keep an eye on the competition page for more details closer to the time.

It’s time to announce the winner of the Fiction Desk Writer’s Award for our tenth anthology, Separations.

The Writer’s Award is a prize of £100, presented to the author of the best story in each of our anthologies, and voted for by the contributors to that volume. This makes it a genuinely peer-judged prize, and a great way of recognising talent.

Separations featured some tough competition for the award, as it contained some superb work, including two stories by previous winners: S R Mastrantone and Alex Clark. In the end our authors decided that the Writer’s Award should go to Fiction Desk newcomer Hannah Mathewson, for her story ‘Two Pounds, Six Ounces’, which tells of a hospital visitor’s crisis when a power cut knocks out the lights in the building.

Congratulations, Hannah!

Our occasional ‘Stories behind Stories‘ series features our writers talking about the inspiration and ideas behind their work. Here, Alex Clark tell us how she came to write ‘Poor Billy’, which is featured in our current anthology Separations.

Ghosts, it seems, are usually attached to places. The haunted house, the haunted graveyard, the haunted wood: as Halloween approaches, you’ll see them adorning everything from boxes of biscuits to babygrows. A thousand horror films have at their centre the Bad Place, where no-one should go but we know they will: the place where the unquiet spirit waits, seeking justice or vengeance.

Give this a moment’s thought, and it’s a bit odd. Why don’t the ghosts go out wandering? Why don’t they go looking for the people who’ve done them wrong? Or try to correct whatever terrible mistake led them to be stuck in the real world? Of course, in some stories and in some other cultures, they do. The ghost in Western culture, though, is usually stuck on its home turf, acting out the same horrors over and over again.

With the dawn of spiritualism, in the Victorian and Edwardian period, it was inevitable that people would start investigating why this might be. Intelligent, rational people set out to investigate hauntings, feats of mediumship and black magic. For a glimpse of the true weirdness of this time I strongly recommend a visit to the Wikipedia page for Harry Price, amateur magician and psychical researcher of the early twentieth century, which features tales of talking mongooses, egg-white ectoplasm and boys transforming into goats.

The idea of seriously investigating these kinds of phenomena seems ludicrous to us now, yet many of the investigators were not fools. They knew that most of the supernatural claims were hoaxes, but they believed that it was possible they might find a tiny core of genuine paranormal activity. This activity could then be investigated, to find the mechanisms by which apparitions might appear to people in the everyday world.

New theories sprung up, theories distinct from previous religious, moral or superstitious understandings of what ‘ghosts’ might be. Victorian psychical researchers William Fletcher Barrett and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, for instance, suggested that strong psychical energy could become imprinted upon materials such as wood or stone, remaining there and disturbing the minds of later visitors. In the mid twentieth century, Welsh philosopher H.H. Price expanded on this and suggested that ghosts might not be unquiet souls, but some kind of memory or recording, held in the matrix of the physical world. His theory of ‘place memory’ suggested that a strand of memory from a person’s mind might attach itself to the physical environment and lodge there, experienced by others as hallucination.

Later, in the 1960s, all these theories were gathered by parapsychologist Thomas Lethbridge to argue for ‘stone tape theory’, the idea that ghostly phenomena are recordings of historical events, stored in the stone and wood that witnessed those events. Ghosts, in this theory, are inanimate shadows, acting out a short loop of the past over and over and over.

Whilst I love the idea of stone tape theory, there are some big problems with it. The first of my objections is: why no happy ghosts? Or ghosts who have strong emotions, but about ridiculous things? If stone tape theory held true, then maternity units the world over would be plagued by endless replays of new-baby bliss, registry offices would be impossible to work in and the M25 would be infested by apparitions with road rage. Furthermore, why are almost all supposed ghosts dead people? Wouldn’t there be lots of recordings of living people?

And this is where Poor Billy started to take shape. Rather than wood or stone, concrete seemed the natural material on which to store a psychical recording. There are very few stone castles and timber-framed houses knocking around nowadays, but an awful lot of concrete tower blocks. Concrete has all of those properties that Billy talks about in the story: it’s great at absorbing sound and heat, so why not memory too? Why not a happy memory? When Maggie’s mum describes the ghost as ‘just a snatch of him,’ this is what I had in mind: a fragment of the past, like a radio station caught and lost again, or a TV channel flicked over.

I’ve written here before about my former career as an archaeologist, and it amuses me to note that many of the early psychical researchers were archaeologists before becoming paranormal investigators. Perhaps there’s something about studying the past, about wanting to know what life was like there, that draws the mind towards ghosts. I know myself that to pull an object out of the ground, to know that the human being who last touched it walked the world of the 1570s, is extraordinary. It is easy to think that the present is the only real time that there has ever been, and that the past looked like a film, or a tapestry, or an illuminated manuscript. It didn’t. The sun shone, the wind blew. 1570 was the only reality, and it was happening just where you’re sitting, reading this. Hundreds of millions of dramas and revelations and deaths have been acted out on every patch of this earth, and all of them are vanished. It seems inconceivable that those emotions left no trace. How appealing it is to imagine that they might have done, and that we might be able to replay those memories and see the past for ourselves.

It was perhaps because of my archaeologist’s training that I was unable to stop myself planting a small artefact in the story, an in-joke of my own. The architecture firm for which Billy works is named Sidgwick Barrett Price, a nod to the people whose ideas birthed stone tape theory. I think they would find it funny. If they don’t, I do hope they won’t come visiting.

— Alex Clark

Fiction Desk contributor Richard Smyth is in the process of crowdfunding his new novel Quays through publishing platform Unbound. Here he tells us about the novel, and its connections to his Fiction Desk story, Crying Just Like Anybody:

Richard has now added a new reward for supporters on his Unbound page. For £35, pledgers can choose to receive both a signed copy of Quays and a signed paperback of Crying Just Like Anybody. Visit his Unbound page and scroll down for details.

I had this map of Manhattan tacked up over my desk for a couple of years. It shows Manhattan Island in 1916, a century ago, just before the US entered the war. The Battery, on the tip of the island, is at the bottom; 110th street, north of Central Park and south of Harlem, is at the top. In the middle – “way out of the way in midtown”, to be exact – is where I set my story ‘Crying Just Like Anybody’. And it’s where Tom Quays, the hero of my new novel Quays, grew up.

Around here no-one calls anyone by their right name. There’s little Tomas Quis who’s Spanish but he’s called Tom Keys, and there’s my sister Jesca and the boys call her ‘Yes’ and make dirty jokes about it. At the repair shop Mr White is really Mr Weiss and then there’s Si Portman who works for the grocer and wears braces on his legs, and he’s just called Dumdum. Johnny ought to be Gianni really but everyone calls him Johnny. He doesn’t mind.

I’m not sure which Tom Quays – or Tom Keys, or Tomás Quis – came first; I have an idea that the Tom of Quays (then barely even a work in progress) strolled into the New York of ‘Crying Just Like Anybody’, but it could have been the other way around, and in any case these things are seldom clear-cut – all these little worlds bleed into one another.

Why New York? Why midtown Manhattan? Why there, and why then? In one sense, there’s a straightforward answer: books. In my early twenties I was led through urban America by a succession of library paperbacks: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and, from after the war, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer most of all. Non-fiction fleshed out the picture: Luc Sante’s Low Life, Anne Douglas’s Terrible Honesty.

I found that there was room in this world for the stories I wanted to tell. Of course, some of these stories – stories about love, death, war, sex – could have been told in any place at any time, but others played on themes that I picked out most clearly in the madly symphonic Manhattan of the early 20th century. These were stories of immigration and identity, of political radicalism, of literary fame, of escape, ambition and opportunity.

The Fiction Desk chose to publish ‘Crying Just Like Anybody’ as the title story in its fourth short-fiction anthology in 2012. It remains one of the stories I’m most proud of; it’s certainly one of the stories I’m most fond of. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these streets: sending Tom Quays stumbling drunk along Broadway, or putting Dorothy Parker on Pearl Street at midnight, or letting Anna Moller look up at the stars from Coenties Slip. I know this place better than anywhere else I’ve never been.

If it’s possible to escape from the places you grew up (and I’m not at all sure that it is) then Tom, in Quays, does escape the crowding alleys of midtown: he goes to war, first of all, and then is plunged into the smoke and glitter of the Jazz Age literary scene. But his past – the grimy Manhattan of ‘Crying Just Like Anybody’ – won’t ever really let him be. He finds its shadows in an upstate mental asylum, in the offices of Metropolitan magazine, in the history of his city, in his own books and stories.

It’s been kind of like that for me. I spent a lot of time in this place – pretty much all of it without leaving my office chair – and it probably won’t ever really let me be, either.

People seemed to connect with ‘Crying Just Like Anybody’, with Anna and Johnny and the sorry-looking Martian they find in midtown Manhattan. I think they’ll connect with Quays, too: I think anyone who ever feels lost in a big city, or who has ever wanted to escape without quite knowing where from or where to, will get along with the novel (as will anyone who wants to read about Damon Runyon reporting from a WW1 shell-hole or a drunk novelist applying Freudian theory to the Dempsey-Tunney fight – it has something for everyone).

The Manhattan of Quays is my Manhattan; Unbound’s crowdfunding model means that it can stay like that, just as I dreamed it up, without creative compromises or focus-grouped revisions, all the way to the bookshop shelf. It’s a terrific place, and it’d be wonderful if you could read the excerpt, pledge to the book, and maybe (cue clink of cocktail shaker, hum of passing El train, opening bars of Rhapsody In Blue) join me there.

— Richard Smyth

Richard Smyth’s prize-winning stories have been published in The Fiction Desk, Structo, The Stinging Fly, Riptide, Minor Literature[s], The Stockholm Review, Foxhole, The Lonely Crowd, Haverthorn, Firewords Quarterly, Vintage Script, The Nightwatchman, Cent and anthologies from Arachne Press and Ink Lines.

His first novel, ‘Wild Ink’, was published in 2014; he also writes for the TLS, The Guardian, The New Statesman and a few others.

You can pledge to buy his new novel ‘Quays’ – and pick up rewards including one-to-one writing mentorship – at: https://unbound.com/books/quays.

Our tenth anthology, titled Separations, is out on September 19th.

Copies will be sent out to subscribers and pre-orderers as soon as they’re back from the printers, usually a few days earlier.

Speaking of which, to pre-order your copy, or to read full details of the new anthology, go over here.