Natalie Ann Holborow

With over one hundred entries, the first year of the South Wales Short Story Competition proved to be a huge success. The competition was created to give unpublished writers a platform to start their writing careers. We received submissions from around the world but sadly, only a few could be chosen. Candy Jar Books is proud to publish the winners of The South Wales Short Story Competition Volume 1. The stories embrace a myriad of topics, including fairytales and fires, aliens and apocalypses, death and even killer trifles...

Lives bustle within a busy hospital's walls, humming against the Gower landscape that stretches beyond its windows. The tiny worlds of a wide cast unfold as they deal with their own emergencies, losses, recoveries, hopes and histories. Medical students stride the length of the corridor in rubber shoes, scars running the lengths of their lives. A janitor is crying in the Gents', watching the flowers at the hospital entrance shrug themselves back into earth. The biblical Lilith offers knowledge from one woman to the other. And somewhere in the distance, a bunker dissolves into gold upon Pennard's shoulder, dusk folding to sleep on Rhossili. The characters in this book are all bound by the undying pulse of existence - yet their stories serve as a reminder that despite these stark contrasts, life persists.

We all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles the bushes below Juliet's balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her bare body, 'nipples stiffening on powdered ribs'. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend - the squat skull grinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child, 'spiralling like sycamore' from the walls of Troy, her husband brutally dragged to death in the dirt that rises around her. All the while, weaved throughout this collection, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with a rawness and honesty that sears, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given the voice that only ever hisses darkly inside the skull. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is always, there slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away - yet forever haunted by hunger.

The poems in this collection explore what it means to be human: where the mythological meets the modern, where fairytales, family and revenge collide, and a haunting mix of love, loss, desire, fear and revenge that is unafraid to unsettle the reader. This remarkable collection of work finds people at their most vulnerable: Achilles counting to ten outside a psychiatrist's door, a man finding himself in the shrinking bedroom of his mid-life, a lost sister chain-smoking into the breeze or a TB victim hacking her rags of lung softly into a pillow. each one unflichingly reveals the truth about what it means to be real. The people in this book may surprise you, their lives may be startlingly varied, but Natalie ann Holborow's poems are an engaging, unnerving and honest exploration of the human experience in all its beauty and rawness.