SmokeLong Quarterly

The SmokeLong Workshop Prize is such a competitive competition. All of the entries have been published, so the standard is already high. In 2025 our workshop participants, previous and current, reported around 400 published works begun in a SmokeLong workshop. Since we began hosting The SmokeLong Workshop Prize is 2024, our workshop participants have reported over 1000 publications. We couldn’t be prouder. In addition to being published widely, our participants have won, placed, or been shortlisted in every major flash competition. Onward, trousers*!

The list below is our shortlist for 2025, from which we’ll choose the top three. The grand prize right now is $500. This competition is free to enter for anyone who has participated in a SmokeLong workshop and has ultimately published something they started in the workshop. It does not matter when you find out about this competition. Say you’re just now reading about The SmokeLong Workshop Prize, and you participated in one of our first in-person workshops in 2019 in the UK. Then you published something you started in that workshop in 2022. You can enter that published piece now.

Please help us celebrate the writers represented on the list below, but please do so without identifying the author. Anonymous judging is ongoing.

 

The SmokeLong Workshop Prize Shortlist

“A Second Mother”
“Blessed”
“Bullets are Not Circles but They Leave Circles Behind”
“Cadillacs on the Moon”
“Canned”
“Closer Than They Appear”
“Gentle”
“Give Us a Hand”
“Gretel”
“Hands”
“Leaving”
“Like Dynamite”
“Like Jesus in a Dead Man’s Float”
“Love with a Troll in a Sweet Potato Vine”
“Mother Perfect”
“My Baby Fights Sleep The Way My Father Fights Death”
“Old Houses Are Like That”
“Ontkommer”
“Preserves”
“Prior to The State Inquiry, My Parents Ran a Children’s Prison”
“Signals”
“Some Cannibals”
“Something Out of a Horror Movie”
“The Altar of Saint Cindy”
“The Bright Jars of Our Bodies”
“The Climb”
“The Election Goes Badly”
“The Night the Walrus Came to Take My Baby”
“The Ocean, the Ocean”
“The Pit”
“The Tao of Thorstein Codbiter”
“The Word Disorder”
“The World According to My Grandmother”
“Vagina First”
“What we talk about when we want to talk about Fight Club”

Congratulations again to all the writers represented by the list above, and congratulations to everyone who informed us in 2025 about their publications that began in a SmokeLong workshop.

*A few years ago, a British editor did a search and replace edit, replacing the word “pants” with the word “trousers,” which led to the wonderful neologism particitrousers. We now refer to our participants as particitrousers or trousers for short. We of course refer to our Australian trousers as daks.