Bermudian Author Wins Fiction Competition

Dr. Mandy-Suzanne Wong, a Bermuda-born writer, has been chosen as the winner of the Eyelands International Flash Fiction Competition.

Entries were judged by Mr. Gregory Papadoyannis, an award-winning writer and co-founder of the Strange Days Books publishing company in Greece. Mr. Papadoyannis said the competition received hundreds of entries from around the world, including the USA, UK, Canada, and many other countries. Adjudication was anonymous; authors’ names and nationalities were omitted from their entries until a winner was determined.

“You can imagine how I puffed up with pride when I saw Bermuda’s name in the first-place winner’s slot,” said Dr. Wong.

Mr. Papadoyannis spoke with her at length about her forthcoming books, her published stories and essays, and her short-short story “Coconut octopus [Amphioctopus marginatus],” which took first place in the competition. Their conversation was published online by Strange Days Books on 1 July 2018.

“Coconut” will be published in both Greek and English in a 2019 print anthology from Strange Days.

“The coconut octopus’ ingenuity was just too wonderful for me to ignore,” Dr. Wong told Mr. Papadoyannis. “This diminutive species really does make body armor out of discards – even out of garbage that humans cast into the ocean.”

In May 2018, Dr. Wong’s debut novel, a literary mystery set in Bermuda, was selected by the University of Alaska Press as a finalist for the Permafrost Book Prize. This novel, entitled Drafts of a Suicide Note, was also awarded an honorable mention in the 2017 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest, named a semifinalist for the 2016 Conium Review Book Prize, and shortlisted for the 2015 Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award, all in the USA.

In 2019, it will be published by Regal House; a traditional, independent, international publishing firm based in North Carolina.

2020 will see the release of Dr. Wong’s first nonfiction book, Listen we all bleed, which is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. The book is about contemporary artists who use sound to do animal activism.

Along with several artists from around the world, the book features Andrew Stevenson, an award-winning filmmaker who also records the songs of Bermuda’s humpback whales. On 17 July 2018, Dr. Wong will be a guest on London’s 104.4 FM radio station, discussing sound, art, and animals with the UK artist Robbie Judkins.

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