With Issue 8 fresh off the press, we are excited to be publishing the winners of our visual prompt competition, run in partnership with Bloomsbury and Writers & Artists. Maggie Chiang, illustrator and past-contributor of Firewords, created a wonderful visual which we asked people to base a short story on. The response and results were amazing!To celebrate this, we’ve recorded a podcast that explains the reasons for our choice of winners and also delves into some other pieces which were submitted. We hope to explain here why our decision was not easy, and why we were blown away by both the number of submissions and quality of writing. In fact, the main thing we were surprised about here was the different kinds of submissions received, each one paying full attention to the prompt but interpreting it in different ways. Creativity was in full flow and we enjoyed every minute of the judging process. So take a listen to this week’s podcast and let us know what you think of our winning stories.