Whodunit Challenge Winners

I was there… but how reliable is eyewitness testimony, really? That’s the question GK Bird asks in a stylish winning piece with that title. This Down Under writer has placed as a runner-up in our Vocal Challenges, and then moved to second place, and now is finally in the winner’s circle, so big congratulations. “I know exactly what happened!” one character exclaims as the tale opens, but then we are given shifting perspectives on the scene, undercutting our assumptions and building suspense around ‘the incident’. Well done!

Parwana Fayyaz comes in second place with Dis-Appearance, a story evocatively set in Afghanistan (“The drying dust starts flying over the hilly landscapes of Kabul. Covering the mountains in an opaque veil.”) which dramatizes the treatment of women in that land while creating a compelling narrative around the moving character of Seema as she goes to bake her daily bread.

A solid ‘whodunit’ is no small matter to create: there’s so many elements that have to come together. Structure, character, style all have to be in place and we had some terrific entries for this challenge. Bravo to Elle Marie for Something in the Water — a runner-up with their very first Vocal story. This hospital ward tale of suspicious deaths in a fish tank is confidently done. Rachel Pollock, a Vocal+ Fiction Award Winner, creates great atmosphere in Stillwaters: there’s powerful use of language here, and as with our winner, shifting perspectives are nicely turned. Finally, Noel T. Cumberland’s Page Thirty-Seven was nicely old skool but modern too, riffing on the detective genre but lifting off from “a cockamamie plan for a Father/Daughter P.I. agency”.

It’s no mystery why all these tales kept us hooked from the first sentence. Whodunit? Why, the Vocal Creators, of course.

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: