When we thought about announcing a story-writing contest to congregate the best stories from all over the world; PenFluenza was born!

To make sure we get literary entries that were worthy of reaching a wider reader base, and the writers are fairly judged for their writing skills; we began our jury-hunt and were soon lucky enough to have found Ms. Susmita Bagchi and Ms. Anupama Dalmia; both adept in the field of literature and contributing to it since years. Both the judges graciously and unconditionally accepted to be our jury for their love for literature, and we shall forever be grateful to them for the same.

In due course of time, the contest received attention from numerous bloggers, literary organizations and writers not only from India, but from all over the world. PenFluenza became our first international short-story writing contest and almost a signature mark for us.

When we decided on the theme ‘Fragrances’; little did we know that we would receive a whopping 142 story submissions on the prompt from all over the world most of which were also following all the participation guidelines. The stories were so beautiful that we went a little over the initial number of winners that had been decided for the contest! While we shortlisted the top stories which were later judged by our jury; it was a very tough choice to make, with each story written thoughtfully and every plot trying to convince us in its own way to be better than the rest.

Here’s what our jury had to say about the stories they read:

• Anushree Bose
• Victoria Fenwick
• Vishaal Pathak
• Tanvi Kashyap
• Anushka Somavanshi
• Louisa Ellemind
• Vibhuti Bhandarkar
• Iravati Kamat
• Amal Behbehani
• Anil Classen
• Nilanjana Banerjee
• Vignesh Sivasankar
• Rupsa Das
• Shilpa Keshav
• Lavanya Girish
• Rohan Swamy
• Gowri Bhargav
• Santhini Govindan
• Savvy Kumar
• Isabelle Jeong
• Fiona Ballard
• Kathrin Spinnler
• Sohini Roy
• Ananya Madhu
• Cara Finegan
• Udita Mukherjee
• Linda Hibbin