Bridport Prize double win for Chichester lecturer

David Swann, a senior lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, has pulled off an astonishing double win in this year's Bridport Prize creative writing competitions.
David SwannDavid Swann
David Swann

He took the first prize of £1,000 in the flash fiction competition for his story ‘Drought’ and was highly commended in the short story category for ‘The War Against the Monsters’.

Flash Fiction judge Tim Stevenson who chose David’s winning story from almost 2,000 entries said it was, “a quiet masterclass in detail and understatement”. Flash fiction is the art of writing a very, very short story – in this case of 250 words or less.

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David Swann has previously worked as a tutor of Creative Writing in prisons, schools, homeless centres, universities and Greek harbour-sides and done a wide range of jobs in the UK and Holland. His short stories and poems have been widely published, including six previous successes in the Bridport Prize and two in the National Poetry Competition. ‘The Privilege of Rain’ (Waterloo Press), based on his experiences as a writer-in-residence in a high-security jail, was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award. Born and raised in Accrington in Lancashire, he agrees with the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti that literature is the “shortest distance between two humans”.

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