In recent years there’s been more recognition that a short story’s impact isn’t limited by its brevity. Flash Fiction has blossomed into its own discrete art form - and we’re now pleased to say that we have a champion of the form among us...
Emma Oldham, a writer based in Newark, has just been awarded First Place in the 2025 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize for her story ‘Dugout’.
‘[Dugout] is a sensual story,’ said competition judge María Fernanda Ampuero, ‘where the senses take on enormous importance: the author makes us feel the heat and the cold, also the play of desire that breaks all authority and social distance…”Here I am, here we are, they haven’t been able to destroy us yet.”’
The piece ‘explores climate inequality through an intimate, sensory lens,’ Emma tells us, ‘grounding the global in the personal…it’s one of the most vulnerable things I’ve ever written.’
That exploration of vulnerability has paid off; the story has also been shortlisted in the fiction category of the 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, an international award championing bold new voices in literature. ‘Dugout’ will, therefore, be published in both the next Oxford Flash Fiction Anthology, and in Wasafiri magazine in the coming year.
LeftLion has covered Emma Oldham before, reviewing her environmentally-conscious children’s book ‘The Whale Who Disappeared’, a work which was informed by her background as a multi-award-winning Conservation Biologist.
She’s since written for our literature and stage sections, and has a brand new story in the first issue of the New Nottingham Journal, published in partnership with LeftLion.
Short fiction takes a deceptively long time to bring to the boil - it’s difficult to compress storytelling into a few hundred words. The fact that Emma’s work has been recognised among international peers is an achievement to savour - and it’s a feather in the bow of our smashing local literary scene, too.
You can read ‘Dugout’, and find out more about the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, here.
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