Skip to content Skip to navigation

Fiction Features

Congratulations to our 2023 Fiction Contest Winner, Melissa DaCosta Brown!

We're excited to announce that Melissa DaCosta Brown is the winner of our 2023 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story "Husbands" will be featured in the upcoming Winter issue of The Fiddlehead (FH298).

Melissa DaCosta Brown is a graduate of Duke University and has a masters in Journalism from Northwestern University. She worked for MSNBC and ABC News affiliates. Her short stories have been published in Waccamaw, Subnivean, Ponder Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Lascaux Prize.

Excerpt from "Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown

Excerpt
"Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown
Winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize

The game was called Husbands. We played the year we were all thirteen and fourteen, fellow campers at the all-girls Camp Pinecrest in Louisville, Maine. Camp was a group of crumbling 1920s-built log cabins dotting a steep mountainside next to the shores of dark freezing Crystal Lake. You heard it. Crystal Lake, like in Friday the 13th, if you can believe it. And yes, the place was horrifying, but not in that way.

Congratulations to 2022 Fiction Contest Winner, Adèle Barclay!

We're excited to announce that Adèle Barclay is the winner of our 2022 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Their story Here Be Dragons ISO will be featured in the upcoming Winter issue of The Fiddlehead (FH294).

Adèle Barclay is the author of two poetry collections If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, which won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Renaissance Normcore. She is currently working on fiction and creative nonfiction projects. They teach literature and writing at Capilano University. 

Yasuko Thanh: Fiction Contest Editorial

The delicate interplay between past and present, what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what others take from us is rendered in pitch-perfect prose in “The Makeweight Piece.” This story is set during a distant war in which the starving and the dying cling to art as prayer. As worship. As a way to define who they once were. So much heart is packed between the lines of a story whose tone is at once tightly focused and expansive that my own heart staggers and cracks open. As a reader I’m dying to be touched and amazed.

Congratulations to Fiction Contest Winner Anne Marie Todkill!

We're excited to announce that Anne Marie Todkill is the winner of our 2021 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story The Makeweight Piece is featured in our Spring issue no. 291, which is available for pre-order now! 

Anne Marie Todkill has published poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction in various Canadian literary magazines. Her winning entry in The Malahat Review 2016 Novella Contest was anthologized in Best Canadian Stories 2017. Her first poetry collection, Orion Sweeping (Brick Books), will appear this spring.

Thank you to all who entered the fiction contest and congratulations to the fifteen finalists. And thanks again to our judge Yasuko Thanh!

Pages