Winners of QuietManDave Prize 2024 are revealed

The winners of the QuietManDave Prize 2024, a short-form writing competition honouring much-loved Manchester critic Dave Murray, have been revealed as Kate Carne and Angela Cheveau. 

Carne took home the top prize for the Flash Fiction category with her story Conversing with the Comma and Cheveau received the award for the Non-Fiction category with To the Grasshopper in bottom right of Van Gogh’s Olive Orchard, 1889.

The winners were revealed at an awards ceremony hosted at Manchester Met’s Manchester Poetry Library last week (December 13) where both Carne and Cheveau were awarded £1,000 prize money. 

Run by Manchester Met’s Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre, the prize celebrates new and emerging short-form writers and is named in honour of Murray, a popular Manchester-based writer and critic who loved to experience new places, art and events, and write about them.

Carne’s winning fiction story Conversing with the Comma takes inspiration from a delicate orange butterfly she spotted in the garden which had a marking in the shape of a perfectly formed comma underneath its wing.

Author of Seven Secrets of Mindfulness: How to Keep Your Everyday Practice Alive (Rider, 2016), Carne’s short stories have won the Wasafiri Prize, the Hammond House Award, and the Bath Flash Fiction Ad Hoc Prize. 

She has also been short-listed for the Bridport Prize, the Alpine Fellowship, the Comma Press Dinesh Allirajah Award, and was a finalist in the Cinnamon Press Literature Award. 

Carne said: “Like QuietManDave, I embraced the act of writing relatively late in life. Perhaps an increasing awareness of mortality stimulates human creativity, or maybe I just realised that writing is more fun than going out to work. I feel grateful to have the space and the unruliness to put words on the page, and it’s a bonus when other people – like all of you – receive those words. 

“Conversing with the Comma arose one morning in the garden, when I was watching a raggedly-edged orange butterfly dancing through the air. It settled and revealed a perfect comma on the brown underneath of its wings. That was three years ago. Unfortunately, this flash fiction turned out to be a kind of omen, because not a single comma butterfly has appeared here since. Next summer, if you happen to see one of these butterflies, immerse yourself its summery orange, its scalloped wings and, of course, that precious punctuation mark.”

Cheveau takes home the prize for Flash Non-Fiction for her powerful non-fiction short story To the Grasshopper in bottom right of Van Gogh’s Olive Orchard, 1889 which addresses issues of gender-based violence. 

Cheveau is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Met and is a full time carer. She has published in poetry anthologies with Writing on the Wall and Written Off Publishing. 

She was shortlisted for The Bridport Prize for Poetry and the Plough Poetry Prize in 2014, the Nine Arches Press Primers competition in 2023 and received an Honorable Mention in the Dark Poets Prize 2024. She was also a finalist in Writing on the Wall’s 2023 Pulp Idol fiction competition, and Liverpool’s National Museums and Galleries Flash Fiction competition.

Cheveau said: “What a complete honour to have been involved in this competition and to have been shortlisted for the non-fiction flash category. As a poet, flash fiction is something I am naturally drawn to both for its brevity and its ability to articulate profound thoughts or emotions in a compressed way. I am thrilled to be alongside such talented writers and to be a small part of such an esteemed competition.

“As a student of Manchester Met, this is even more special to me. I wanted to write this piece in order to commemorate my friend Rachel who took her own life. This is my way of showing the world that she was important, her story was important, all of our stories are. I am incredibly grateful to be involved at all, and the organisers and staff involved have been nothing short of wonderful and supportive. The whole competition has been a joy to have been a part of.”

Second place in the Flash Fiction category was awarded to Jay McKenzie with Florence Nightingale is late for her eyebrow threading appointment while Kerry Andrew took home third place with Back Home. 

Taking second place in the Flash Non-Fiction category is Heather D. Haigh with When I Say You Look Tired, I Mean You’re Going to Die, and Steve Ashton was awarded third place with Bringing Up The Bodies.

Running every two years, the QuietManDave Prize celebrates new and emerging short-form writers, with this year’s prize receiving more than 900 entries.

The winners and shortlist were selected by a panel of judges chaired by Michael Pinchbeck, Professor of Theatre at Manchester Met, alongside Catherine Love, Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York, playwright Mufaro Makubika, and writer and journalist Joe Shute. 

Love commented: “I was so impressed by the quality and experimentation that we saw across the entries to this year’s Prize. I have loved being surprised by what writers are able to do within the constraints of a tight word count and I’m excited about the wide-ranging selection of pieces that have made it to the final shortlist.”

Profiles of the winners and their pieces, along with shortlisted pieces can be read in full for the Flash Fiction and Flash Non-Fiction categories. Find the longlisted entrants on the QuietManDave Prize website.