Hysteria 2020 finalists

It’s taken 6 months, many hours on the part of lots of people including all the wonderful entrants, and finally I’m at the stage where I can announce the finalists in the Hysteria 2020 Writing Competition. The under 16’s category hasn’t been finalised yet, so I will update this post later this week when I have the details.

As usual the standard was exceptionally high and it was hard to choose between so many good entries and I just want to say a huge thank you to Becky Danks who also judged half the entries as well. Of course, there were many entries which were disqualified for not following the rules and we had many which went way over the word counts set for each category. If there is one piece of advice I would like to give every writing competition entrant, it’s read the rules and any guidelines as they will make sure your entry has the best chance of being read by the judges.

All the adult finalists have been informed and are busy creating their mini-biographies for the anthology and hopefully, are looking forward to hearing who will be the overall winner in their category. The winners will all be announced when the anthology is published in early December, just in time for Christmas.

The names are in no particular order and are as follows:

Flash Fiction Category

• EE Rhodes – A lighthouse mourning
• Michelle Christophorou – The cake in the shape of a five
• Ana Agaronyan – Clipons
• Tricia Lowther – Birthday, 1973
• Richard Teague – Eggie
• Eithne Cullen – Horold Holt
• Karenlee Thompson – The watcher
• Tiffany White – Working title
• Jessica Joy – Big brother
• Oruare Ojimadu – End and beginning

Poetry Category

• Punnet Chansuria – Virus
• Aishah Adams – Your words can’t break me
• A.M. Cash – The Poets Meeting
• Abdulrahman M. Abu-Yaman – Pulchritudinous Purple
• Heather Cook – A call from a friend
• Anita Michael – Africa; who we are
• Rita Azekwoh – Ingredients to destruction
• The sparkling sun of kindness – Rahma Jimoh
• Fiona Ritchie-Walker – Manifesto
• Manasa Kalluri – Lavender

Short Story

• Sam Payne – On the train to London
• Jane O’Connor – The flower box
• Mara Dougall – Grace
• Jasmine Arden-Brown – Autumn lupins
• Laura Besley – God’s Great Chessboard
• Chase Cartwright – Spring cleaning
• Veronica Bright – Giving in
• Kate Leimer – <<But you don’t know my name>>
• Rosaleen Lynch – The indentation of pearls
•  In vino veritas – Gillian Scholey

Under 16’s Children’s category

I will list the finalists as I receive permission from their parents or guardians, so expect this to update several times over the next few days. Our finalists are:

• Ana Ramljak – The hidden beauty of our past actions
• Nguyen Cat Tuong Anh – Sad Live
• Malumi Adeboye – Evergreen
• Fausto Padilla – To the dead mother
• Nguyen Dinh Ha Anh – The rest of all
• Nguyen Dinh Ha Phuong – Doll’s story
• Rachel Xu – You are free
• Ihtiram Ullah – Hard Times
• Mehjabeen Haque Biva – A fantastic forest