Christina Hyun publishes her 2012 award winning story

Christina Hyun

'The Stool Pigeon' - Winner of GGBT's Best Thriller Award in 2012

Christina Hyun, who won the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s award for Best Thriller for her entry ‘The Stool Pigeon’ in the annual creative writing competitions in April 2012, has published her winning short story electronically.

The version which is available on Smashwords is suitable for any e-reader and for downloading to a computer, while the version available on Amazon is intended for Kindle e-readers only.

The successful writer travelled from Issaquah in Washington State (USA) to Berkhamsted (England, UK) to receive her prize, which was presented by Prof Peter Evans (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) at the Graham Greene International Festival on Saturday 29th September 2012.

As an entry in the competition, ‘The Stool Pigeon’ had to begin with the line “A voice near his/her/my foot said, 'Got a cigarette?'….” and she continued from there. Christina then developed the tale of a female State Security agent in the capital of North Korea who is given the green light to betray her country's president.

Her short story, ‘The Odd Job’ was first published in Bellowing Ark, a literary tabloid which is published fortnightly in Shoreline (WA, USA) and features ten new writers per year. The story achieved second place in Mom Writers Literary Magazine's short fiction contest. She workshopped this story at Zoetrope's online writing community, to which she is grateful for critical responses and support. Along with Christina’s two other short stories ‘Cuckoo Funeral’ and ‘Magique’, ‘The Odd Job’ was published in 2013, and is also available from Smashwords and Amazon.

Christina has been blogging at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper since 2006, and is on hiatus to finish her novel, which will be a political thriller.

To follow her progress, you may connect with her Blog, her Facebook and Twitter pages.

Writers who wish to enter this year’s Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s creative writing competitions must submit their entries by 1st April 2014.

In 2014 prose writers must begin their competition entries with the following words, and continue from there:

'Three doors opened off a dark passage. From behind one of them there seeped the smell of....'

In 2014 screenplay writers and playwrights must embed the same words somewhere in the dialogue of their competition entries.

Full details of the competitions (including information on the categories, presentation and submission of entries) may be seen on the Trust’s website, where the winning entries in the competitions in 2013 may also be read.