Open Competitions 2025 Results
Liz Ashcroft • 1 December 2025
Results of the 2025 OPEN competitions - Short Story & Poetry
The NAWG OPEN competitions have now been judged. CASH PRIZES for 1st 2nd and 3rd in each category are being awarded. HERE ARE THE RESULTS:
Short Story
1st Simon Rees-Jones - ‘Shot at Dawn’
2nd Charles Kitching - ‘Never Mock the Clown’
3rd Jan Keegan - ‘Life Imitating Art’
Poetry
1st Simon Rees-Jones - ‘The Camera Clicked’
2nd Elin Lewington - ‘A Wild Green Thing’
3rd Gwyneth Box - ‘I Dream of My Mother’
Thank you to all those who entered. The winning entries will be published in our anthology, The Write Path 2025.
Here is the winner of our spooky ghost / horror story NAWG 2025 Autumn 250-word Flash Fiction competition . It ran from Friday 3rd to Friday 31st October, First, second, and third place entries will also be published in Link magazine. See the website HERE The prize of £25 for the winning entry goes to SUSAN KING for her story: RUSSIAN ROULETTE. I dread this day. Pumpkins with grinning faces and kids running about dressed as ghosts. Ghosts don’t wear costumes, they’d know that if they’d seen one. I can cope with all that – it’s the knocking on doors blackmailing adults into giving them treats that frightens me. Don’t they know how dangerous this is? Agnes has a bucket of Cadbury Heroes by the door. Her children have grown up and left home which is a relief to me, I can tell you I want to yell at the little ones who stand with expectant faces when she opens the door. Bugger off, I want to shout. But of course, I can’t. You can’t imagine the horror of watching her fill her syringe and pierce the wrapper of a chocolate bar, plunging the needle into the gooey inside and withdrawing it empty. You don’t know what it’s like to watch helpless as she smiles and hands out the sweets. She’s not daft enough to poison each one. For her it’s a game of Russian roulette. She waits for the post on the village Facebook page. She reads the hundreds of messages of sympathy with glee, scrolls slowly through emojis of crying faces, pink hearts and praying hands. She notes the date of the funeral and gets out her dark clothes. It’s the same black dress and coat she wore my cremation. A human black widow spider, she dispensed with me after our children were born. It’s just other people’s children she dislikes.
Members can go to the Members Only page (you'll need the password) and read stories that were a little too long to fit in the normal Link magazine - see the section marked 'Fiction Special' --> HERE
The deadline date for paying 2025-26 subscriptions to NAWG is 31st August 2025. Any groups or individuals who have not paid by this date will be removed from the active database and will not be sent publications in future, able to vote in the AGM, allowed to enter the 2026 members' competitions, or be listed on the website. The groups and individual members who have not yet paid are being advised of the deadline. Groups and Individuals who fail to pay up may of course re-join. New groups and individuals joining the association will pay the full subscription (group £50, individual £25, student £15) and with their joining pack will be sent access to all the Link magazines published since 1st July 2025. They will be encouraged to enter the Members' competitions 2026 (closing date 31st March 2026.) After 31st March, new joiners subscriptions will cover them until 30th June 2027 i.e. they get their first period of up to three months free.
