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Interview with 2025 Third prize winner - Morgan Brennan

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 Meet the Winners! Morgan Brennan lives in Berkshire and is a member of two brilliant writing groups. He has been writing short stories and flash fiction since he retired. He has had stories published by Flash Fiction Magazine and Secret  Attic and have been shortlisted in the Exeter Short Story competition before. Morgan has also been  longlisted in The Writers & Artists Short Story competition and the Farnborough Flash Fiction  competition. How did you feel when you found out you’d won? I was absolutely delighted. I hadn’t looked out for the results, so the first I knew was when I got the email congratulating me. I had been shortlisted a few years ago in the competition, but this was extra special. Where did you get the idea?   My fictional story of Malachy Doyle comes from an interest in the Troubles. I had viewed the BBC’s excellent documentary series, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland , and read Tim Pat Coogan’s seminal account of the period, The Tr...
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Interview with 2025 Second prize winner - Jay McKenzie

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 Meet the Winners! Jay McKenzie’s work appears in  adda , Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream and others. She recently won the Fish Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for  the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel,  How to Lose the Lottery   will be published by Harper Fiction Spring 2026. Where did you get the idea?  I was playing around with format and my main goal was to see if I could use something really pedestrian in format - a list - and tell a complete story with emotional pull. Since becoming a mother, I think a lot about my relationship with my beautiful mother and my beautiful daughter and I'm a little sandwich filling between them. I wanted to see if I could write something powerful about those relationships in a rigid structure.  Do you have any writing heroes or favourite authors?  In novels, my writing hero is Rachel Joyce, who just has the most beautifully drawn characters. She...
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Interview with the 2025 First prize winner - Jillian Grant Shoichet

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 Meet the Winners! Jillian Grant Shoichet  endured an idyllic childhood in pastoral southwestern British Columbia (where nothing happens unless someone sets things in motion), which meant that at an early age she became a fiction instigator. Over time, friends and family members have come to accept they will find reflections of themselves in her work. Jillian is most comfortable writing about uncomfortable human experience: love and loss and our quest to find a meaningful balance between the two. You can visit her author website at  www.jilliangrantshoichet.com ,    Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/jilliangrantshoichet/   Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/jilliangshoichet How did you feel when you found out that you’d won? I’d been travelling for about 24 hours – 3 flights from Victoria, British Columbia, to Berlin, Germany – when I received the email from Exeter Writers. I walked in the front do...
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Read the Third Prize Winner 2025 - Malachy Doyle by Morgan Brennan

Malachy Doyle  by  Morgan Brennan He stared at the coals. Their heat had dissipated around the room and now they were past their prime. Remnants winked from the hearth like warnings. Red to ash grey. Stop. Don’t go. Malachy Doyle leant back in his favourite armchair and sucked on his pipe. The aromatic mixture filled his mouth, throat and lungs and he held his breath as if he were drowning before extracting the mouthpiece to exhale a great grey plume.   ‘Fecking eejits.’     Doyle knew he was past his prime and knew they’d be on their way. The men in the trench-coats and black berets. The Belfast Brigade. Coming for Malachy Doyle. Former foot soldier and champion of Cowan Street. The Newry firebrand whose fire had gone out. The phone call. “Is it Malachy Doyle I’m speaking to?”   “Tis he. Who’s calling?”   “That doesn’t matter. You listen. You’ve been seen talking to the RUC again and then one of my men gets arrested the following morn—" “Now hold...
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