I wanted to know. "Why are its eyes open if he's asleep?" "Because he's sleeping much deeper than the eyes-closed kind of sleep." He ran his thumb over its eye. "This is how you tell how deep he's under. Count how long until he blinks." From The Blink Response by Alison Kelly Winner, 2017 Newcastle Short Story Award One of the pleasures of judging this year's competition has been listening to a vast rangeddd of those voices, even if it came with a more complicated pleasure: how to measure them against each other, the perennial problem of apples and oranges . . . There were good stories that didn't make the anthology cut: there were terrific stories that didn't make the prize list. However, we hope that the stories collected here will all astound in different ways, and that there are stories for all tastes and temperaments. Peter Goldsworthy & Maria Takolander, Judges 2017