I’m over the moon to have been awarded second prize in the Ilkley Literature Festival Short Story Competition 2014 for my story Authentic Athens. It was a pretty exciting night being asked to read an extract out in front of an audience which included a Booker prize finalist, gulp! Fortunately they all laughed in the right places.

You can read the story here.

The competition was judged by Dreda Say Mitchell. Here’s what she had to say about Authentic Athens:

“A great opening scene nicely sets up our protagonist with a tense dilemma that needs solving. The setting of a prison cell really had me intrigued about where this story was going to lead me. It plays around with time structure so it starts at the end rather than the beginning. It is very funny, but under the layers of humour it deals with very serious and topical issues. Written in a fluid and confident style with characters that easily jump off the page.”