2025 Creatives Flash Contest Runners Up
The quality of submissions in each category of our 2025 Creatives Flash Contests was exceptionally high. This made choosing winners quite the challenge, but it has given us a fantastic opportunity to share some more incredible work, inspired by the great outdoors. Take a moment to read through the runners-up in each of the four categories below and find out more about the winners in our Flash Contest Winners post.
And as always, we would like to take this opportunity to once again thank The Highland Bookshop and The Fort William Mountain Festival for supporting this year’s contests and helping us showcase the work of so many fantastic creatives.
2025 Flash Poetry Runner Up – Duilleagan by Ricky Brown
Os cionn mo chinn, am plangaid:
Sgòth-fhillte, sgòth-snìomh ’s sgòth-torrach.
Fo mo bhotannan, na duilleagan:
Grian-chlach, haidrocarbon, clach-ghràin.
Le mo làimh, uisge airson seann uisge-beatha:
Gleann Mòr, Gleann Urraidh, Gleann Eisge, Gleann Ùigidh.
Ricky Monahan Brown’s new poetry pamphlet Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books) has been acclaimed as “wonderfully audacious”. His memoir, Stroke: A 5% chance of survival, was a Scotsman Nonfiction Book of 2019, and reviewers wrote that the 2024 fiction collection, Terminal, summons his literary hero, Robert Louis Stevenson.
Instagram: @ricky_ballboy
2025 Flash Fiction Runner Up – Across I Move by Kitty Dennis
Across I move, dutifully trying to stay upright. The snow below, the peak above, a traverse is the only way to make progress. I feel unbalanced, a little scared, and my foot slips; the snow falls far below from under my feet. This track will lead me to a gully that has been beckoning all year. …
Kitty is a relatively new mountaineer, having come across from mountain biking and ultra-distance cycling. Spending the past few summers and winters in the mountains, she’s learnt more about the world around her and has found peace accessing cairns via rope, ski, foot and bike. She’s often out finding new heights with the Eden Valley Mountaineering Club.
2025 Flash Visual Art Runner Up – Colours of the Cairngorms by Ellie Dimambro-Denson
Colour of the Cairngorms is a painting made from swatches of handmade natural pigments, made through a mixture of lake pigmentation reactions and ground material, which is then mixed with a binder to make watercolour paint …
Ellie is an ecologist, artist and mountain leader, based in the Cairngorms. She primarily works with watercolours, recently experimenting with creating natural pigments from the landscapes her paintings are inspired by. In her work, she looks to join together a sense of being in place with connectivity to the more than human world and hope for its future.
Instagram: @ellie_dimambro
2025 Flash Nonfiction Runner Up – It’s a Fine Day by JG St Clair
Green is new; grey is old. To clamber this hill is to go back in time. The newest moment is in the lush emerald of moss and grass and pine bough. Pass then through russetty waves of fern and rushes that still hold recent summer light, heather pinks and purples clinging on through October winds, blips of sun-dappled memory. …
JG St Clair is a writer from Edinburgh with a love for the Scottish mountains and the great outdoors.
Images
Lead image: Partial eclipse from Gairloch © Rob Lovell
Layers of hills from Torridon © Rob Lovell
Skiers in the Cairngorms © Al Todd