ENSFR

Competition Deadline: The Yeovil Prizes
2026-05-31
From the competition website:

2026 Competition Open From 1 Jan 2026 to 31 May 2026

Organised by the Yeovil Community Arts Association, this is your opportunity to enter five very different categories of writing. Aspiring writers throughout the world should enter this prestigious writing competition.

Submit here.

Event: An Evening with Colm Tóibín
2026-05-31 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Paris) | The Black-E, The Black-E, 1 Great George Street, Liverpool, L1 5EW
To mark the publication of Colm Tóibín’s highly anticipated short story collection The News from Dublin (Picador), Writing on the Wall is delighted to reveal that the acclaimed Irish author will appear at WoWFEST26 on Sunday 31 May, chaired by Professor Frank Shovlin.
Tóibín will discuss The News from Dublin, a striking and deeply moving sequence of stories that span continents and generations, from wartime Ireland to Barcelona, Argentina and beyond. Moving between lives marked by exile, secrecy and loss, these luminous narratives explore family ties, displacement, and the enduring pull of home and memory.
Born in Enniscorthy in 1955, Tóibín is the author of numerous acclaimed novels and short story collections, including The Empty Family, Brooklyn, The Master, The Magician and Long Island. A three-time Booker Prize finalist, he has received the David Cohen Prize for Literature, served as Laureate for Irish Fiction (2022–2024), and was Chancellor of the University of Liverpool until 2017.
He will be joined by Frank Shovlin, Professor of Irish Literature at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies and an acclaimed critic and editor. Shovlin is renowned for his scholarship on James Joyce and John McGahern, including The Letters of John McGahern (Faber & Faber) and the forthcoming biography John McGahern: A Writing Life.

Residency: Borders Traditions Residency
2026-06-01 | Hugo Burge Foundation
Residency Dates: Wed Sept 23rd to Wed Oct 21st 2026
This is a residency for an artist or creator of any medium who has an interest in looking to history, legend, and local culture as a source of creative inspiration and who would help us capture a tradition, place, or story that is significant to the Scottish Borders.
The Scottish Borders is a vibrant place with many celebrated stories and traditions, as well as many stories that are yet to be told.
This residency is aimed at supporting a creative who finds inspiration in tradition, legend, history, or community stories who will help us capture a local tale through their artistic medium, be it illustration, sculpture, performance, textiles, etc.
This is a fully funded residency that includes exclusive studio space, accommodation in one of our Hobbit Pods, and a weekly stipend of £350.
There are no expectations about what you will use the residency for, but we hope the selected artist will conduct at least one public event such as a creative workshop (for adult participants), a talk, demonstration, performance or educational activity.
You will be able to spend time with other artists and makers on site, along with another visiting artist also on residency. Our Creative Director, Dr James Fox will provide mentorship during your stay.
Deadline: June 1st
Decision By: June 13th

Competition Deadline: The MTP Short Story Competition
2026-06-01
From the competition website:

In our quest to offer authors a stage for their work, we are excited to be hosting our 2026 Short Story Competition.

First Prize: £1000 (GBP)
Second Prize: £500 (GBP)
Third Prize: £250 (GBP)
5 Runners-up Prizes of £50 (GBP)
Prizewinning stories will be published in the MTP 2026 Anthology (print book and eBook). The Anthology title will be based on the title of the winning entry.

Submit here.

Event: ENSFR reading group, June meeting
2026-06-01 17:00 - 19:00 | Zoom
The next short fiction reading group meeting will take place (via Zoom) on Monday 1st June at 5pm (UK time). Below, you can find information on how to join the online meeting room. I have attached an iCalendar file that you can add to your calendar.
During the meeting, we will be discussing Julie-Ann’s reading suggestion: the short story “Death by Landscape” by Margaret Atwood. You can access the short story from this link:
https://223141929335512656.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/0/9/17093284/deathbylandscape_atwood.pdf
Our conversation will focus on the following discussion points that Julie-Ann has selected:

The story opens in a domestic interior but moves to a landscape of ‘wilderness’. How are these two contrasting spaces integral to the story?
Is there a power dynamic in the friendship between Lois and Lucy?
What is significant about the presentation of the camp and the language Atwood uses?
Does this story fit the category of bildungsroman?
How does Atwood explore ideas of colonisation?
In the following quote bodily absence is made significant. How does this idea relate to the wider societal conceptualisation of the female body through art, culture and mass media? How are female bodies represented elsewhere in the story?

“But a dead person is a body; a body occupies space, it exists somewhere. You can see it; you put it in a box and bury it in the ground, and then it’s in a box in the ground. But Lucy is not in a box or in the ground. Because she is nowhere definite, she could be any where.”

Structurally the story moves from present to past to present, using character memory to explicate the main story. How does ‘framing’ the past within the present impact ideas and meanings?
The story ends with a mystery? Is the reader invited to play detective?

Those who are interested in exploring the work further might want to read Atwood’s collection Wilderness Tips which also features “Death by Landscape”. Many of the other short stories in the collection are worth reading in conjunction, particularly “True Trash”. This is a recommendation by Julie-Ann. It is not mandatory to read further short stories for the meeting.
—
Ines Gstrein is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Short Fiction Reading Group – June 2026
Time: Jun 1, 2026 05:00 PM London
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85116499205?pwd=[REDACTED]

Residency: Magnetic 5
2026-06-02 | Cove Park
We are thrilled to continue our involvement in the Magnetic Residencies programme, in partnership with Villa Arson, Nice. The Magnetic 5 call for applications is open until Tuesday 2 June 2026. Cove Park welcomes applications from artists based in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Scotland-based artists are welcome to apply to Villa Arson. The Magnetic Residencies programme offers a 2-month bespoke residency, £2,100 monthly fee, accommodation and access to a workspace, curatorial mentoring and international networking opportunities.
Magnetic, managed by Fluxus Arts Projects, is a Franco-UK network bringing together five organisations from France and five from the UK to create a programme of funded residencies for visual artists based in both countries.
Tandem Capc, Bordeaux, Nouvelle-Aquitaine / Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, England:
Capc residency is open to artists based in England
Wysing Arts Centre residency is open to artists based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine
Tandem Frac Grand Large, Dunkirk, Hauts-de-France / Flax Art Studios, Belfast, Northern Ireland:
Frac Grand Large residency is open to artists based in Northern Ireland
Flax Art Studios residency is open to artists based in Hauts-de-France
Tandem Villa Arson, Nice, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur / Cove Park, Argyll & Bute, Scotland:
Villa Arson residency is open to artists based in Scotland
Cove Park residency is open to artists based in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur
Tandem Frac Bretagne, Rennes / Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, Wales:
Frac Bretagne residency is open to artists based in Wales
Aberystwyth Arts Centre residency is open to artists based in Brittany
Tandem Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, Île-de-France / Gasworks, London, England:
Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research residency is open to artists based in England
Gasworks residency is open to artists based in Île-de-France
Applicants from England are invited to make one application only and can either apply to Capc, Bordeaux or Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris.

Call for Papers: "American Shorts"
2026-06-10
CFP: “American Shorts” University of Lisbon, Portugal, October 29-31, 2026

Conference: 8th Annual ENSFR Conference at the University of Artois
2026-06-10 - 2026-06-12 | University of Artois, Arras, France
We are excited to announce a Save The Date for the 8th Annual ENSFR Conference. The conference will be held at the University of Artois (Northern France) on the 10-12th of June 2026. The title of the conference is: “In Different Shapes: the short story and its modes of circulation in magazines and newspapers.”
Following the ideas initiated at the Leuven conference in 2017 on the short story, its contexts and co-texts, the 2026 ENSFR conference will be devoted to short forms appearing in magazines and newspapers.
The conference will consider any story printed in such media but also stories that were solely published in magazines and newspapers (as opposed to stories that were later collected in book form), adapted into film or into longer works of fiction (as is often the case with The New Yorker). Panelists may also work on any short form to be found in magazines (commercials, letters to the editor, notes…) as well as illustrated stories—the illustrations providing yet another short story from to explore.
Certain magazines target a specific audience, and it could be stimulating to reflect upon writers’ ability to please (at least on the surface) literary editors. In the nineteenth century, stories were often referred to as “articles,” “tales” or “sketches”—how does this influence our understanding of the text? What are the differences between stories printed in magazines and those printed in newspapers?
The conference will give us an opportunity to discuss magazine publication with several authors and see how magazine and newspaper publication has evolved since its earliest forms.

Competition Deadline: V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize
2026-06-22
From the competition website:

The RSL V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize seeks to find the best unpublished short story of the year.
The 2027 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize is now open for entry until Monday 22 June at 5pm. Please ensure you have read and understood the V.S. Pritchett Prize Eligibility and Guidelines prior to entering.

Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize
2026-06-30
From the competition website:

The 2026 Queen Mary  Wasafiri New Writing Prize is now open.
The seventeenth edition of the prize is now open for original entries and entries in translation across Fiction, Life Writing, and Poetry.

Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Fiction Factory Short Story Competition
2026-06-30
From the competition website:

Top prize- £500
Length of story: max 3,000 words
Entries should be as a Word document.
All types of stories are welcome (excluding Children’s and Young Adult
Fiction).
Entry Fee: £7.00 (£13 for 2 stories, £18 for 3 stories)
Entry fee plus optional critique: £35.00

Winning stories will be published on this website and, at a later date in a planned anthology

Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Wells Short Story Competition
2026-06-30
From the competition website:

Got a potential page-turner inside you? Then polish up your prose and send your entry to this year’s Short Story Competition. First prize is £750, while second and third-place winners will receive £300 and £200 respectively.
There is also a special prize of £100 in the category for best local author.
Competitions open on 1 April and close on 30 June.

Enter here.

Competition Deadline: The Olga Sinclair Prize
2026-06-30
From the competition deadline:

Theme: WALLS
Word Limit: 2000 words (excluding the title)
The Brief: Judges are looking for wise choices of vocabulary, well-structured plotting and description, sparkling dialogue, pace and precision. Although the theme is always selected to represent Norwich you are free to interpret this however you see fit. Your story does not have to be connected to Norwich, but it does need to have the concept of Walls as its central theme.

Enter here.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on William Faulkner in Journal of the Short Story in English
2026-10-30
JSSE 90 (Spring 2028)
Guest edited by:

Françoise Buisson,Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour
Solveig M. Dunkel, Université de Lille
Frédérique Spill, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, president of the William Faulkner Society.

Deadline for abstract submissions: 30 October 2026

Suggested Proposals
The purpose of this special issue of JSSE is thus to examine the challenges faced by Faulkner as a short story writer, especially—but not exclusively:

the status of the short story in Faulkner’s work and its reception
economic imperatives and consumerism
experimentation and short fiction as “a creative writing workshop”
Faulkner’s play with the traditional forms, conventions and contents of the genre: narrative technique, stylistic devices and strategies, punctuation and typography
Faulkner’s phenomenological writing, his writing of sensation
ellipsis and the unspeakable; condensation and proliferation
Faulkner’s use of different chronotopes and his handling of chronology
meta/short fiction and the mise en abyme of short story writing
the Southern Gothic
orality, cock-and-bull stories and tall tales, short fiction and humor, Frontier humor
the ecopoetic dimension in wilderness short stories
initiation in the short story and for the short story teller
childhood and children as story-tellers and/or characters
margins in the short story: the community and the individual; race and gender relations for example
queer Faulkner
