We could never have anticipated the overwhelming response we received for the Jeffrey Archer Short Story Challenge we introduced in January in partnership with Curtis Brown Creative. After receiving almost a thousand stories from writers all over the UK and North America, our judges worked evenings and weekends to get through them all.

And they were good.

Really, really good.  Fantastic, even. They were so good that it took an extra round of judging to narrow the field down to only twenty.  And having to cut some of them from the final list of 20 broke our hearts so much that we decided to include them in a special “Honourable Mention” section in the upcoming eBook anyway, just because we thought they were amazing and deserved to be seen.

Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer now has the twenty stories we’ve judged to be the best, and will announce the three finalists at the London Book Fair on April 15^th, 2013.
Until then, however, we’d love to introduce you to the twenty talented writers whose stories will be read and judged by Jeffrey Archer himself:

Congratulations to our twenty amazing semi-finalists!  We wish each of you the best of luck.

We also have three authors who touched our judges with their stories, and we’d like to give a loud & proud Kobo shout-out to our three Honourable Mentions:

These were the stories we loved so much, but could neither include them nor bring ourselves to completely omit them. We felt they were strong enough to deserve special mention.

Look for these three stories—as well as all twenty semi-finalist stories—in the upcoming FREE Kobo promotional eBook, available worldwide.  And keep your eyes peeled for all the authors listed here today!  Only one will win the grand prize of enrolment in the Curtis Brown Creative writing course, but they all deserve to, and we know they’ll be making even more waves on their own in the future.

Thank you, all of you, for entering, and showing us just how much raw talent there is in the Kobo Writing Life community.  You amaze us.