5 days left to enter Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition

Closing date: 31 October 2020
Judge: Roger Elkin, author of Marking Time and Sheer Poetry

Enter your poem or suite of poems in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition closing on 31st October 2020. This competition is for original, previously unpublished poems in English Language, on any subject, in any style up to 50 lines long. Visual poems are welcome as long as the image fits into one page. Poets of all nationalities living in any part of the world are eligible to enter.

Prizes: £250.00 (first), £100.00 (second), £50.00 (third), £30 x 3 (high commendation), £15.00 x 3 (commendation) and 3 x SLQ paperback (special mentions). 

Entry Fees: £5/1, £8/2, £10/3, £12/4, £14/5, £16/7, £22/10)

Enter online now at https://sentinelquarterly.com/competitions/poetry/index.htm

or download an Entry Form for postal entry here

F(r)iction Contests: Short Stories, Flash Fiction, and Poetry

F(r)iction’s Fall 2020 Contests are now open!

Deadline: October 30, 2020
Results: Announced March 8, 2021
Prizes: Win $1,600 in Prizes!
Guest Judges: Lev Grossman, Benjamin Woodard, and Rachel Mennies
Categories: Short Story, Flash Fiction, Poetry

Categories Accepted

• Short stories: 1,001 – 7,500 words
• Flash fiction: (up to three pieces in the same document) up to 1,000 words per piece
• Poetry: (up to five poems in the same document) up the three pages per poem

Please visit our guidelines page to properly format your work for submission. We won’t reject a submission flat out for not following guidelines, but we will frown the whole time we’re reading.

What We Look For in Submissions

Our editors have drafted up this fantastic page on our website to share what we look for in our creative submissions. We strongly recommend you read this and check out the examples before submitting to get an idea of our general publishing aesthetic. 

We also highly recommend checking out a past issue of F(r)iction. We have several pieces available online, but there’s nothing like holding a glossy, full-color issue in your hands. You can check out all of our issues in our shop. 

Our Submission Guidelines

The winner will be announced publicly on March 8, 2021. All participants will be notified about the contest results through their Submittable account. Judges’ decisions are final. 

We accept work, written in English, from anywhere in the world—regardless of genre, style, or origin—and welcome speculative writing and experimental literature. Strange is good. Strange with a strong character arc is even better. Keep it weird, folks.

Writers over the age of thirteen are welcome to submit. Please note that if your work is selected for publication, we will require a signature from a parent or a guardian.

We are unable to offer refunds for contest submissions, so please read these guidelines and choose your submission category carefully. 

Staff members are not eligible for participation.    

We read all submissions anonymously. Please include your name and contact information in your cover letter only and remove any identifying information from both the submitted manuscript and the file name as well.

Any work previously submitted to F(r)iction for publication is not eligible.

Please also be aware that as we receive hundreds of submissions for each of our contest we are unable to offer personalized feedback. It’s not that we don’t want to, but there’s only so many volunteer staffers on our team.

We accept, and encourage, simultaneous submissions and only ask that you withdraw your piece(s) using Submittable upon acceptance elsewhere. 

We edit every piece accepted for publication, including all our contest winners whether you work is selected for publication through our online blog or in our print magazine. For this collaborative process we will pair you with one of our Senior Editors. All our editors have been trained to help guide the development of each piece to reach its fullest potential in keeping with the author’s vision. This does not mean we will take on a wild jumble of words and half-formed musings. But it does mean that we value your work and want to help each piece to be as unforgettable as possible.

NOTES: 

F(r)iction (and its parent nonprofit organization, Brink Literacy Project) reserves the right to discuss contest entries, finalists, and winners in podcasts and marketing materials.

F(r)iction reserves the right to NOT award a winner in any categories if the submissions do not reach a publishable standard. In this case, reading fees will NOT be refunded and a winner will not be announced. Although this has rarely come to pass in our six year publishing history, our top priority must remain with the quality of work we publish.

For full Submission Guidelines, please read the information on our Submittable page carefully. And please visit our formatting guidelines page to properly format your work for submission.

An insider tip for you all: We seek work that actively pushes boundaries, that forces us to question traditions and tastes. If your work takes risks, we want to read it. We like strong narratives that make us feel something and stories we haven’t seen before. To get an idea of the kind of work we look for, please check out this page from our editors detailing what we look for in our submissions.

We also strongly recommend checking out a past issue of F(r)iction before submitting to our contests to get an idea of our general publishing aesthetic. We have several pieces available online, but there’s nothing like holding a glossy, full-color issue in your hands. You can check out all of our issues in our shop.

How to enter: https://frictionlit.org/contests/

Visit the website: https://frictionlit.org/