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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.

Residency: Jaunpils Writers’ Castle Residency (Latvia 2026)
2026-06-30 | The National Centre for Writing
The Tukums UNESCO City of Literature Writer-in-Residence Programme will be based at Jaunpils Castle in the Tukums region of Latvia. Traditionally published writers, poets, playwrights and screenwriters connected to UNESCO Cities of Literature are invited to apply.
The residency will take place in October 2026 and will run for 2-4 weeks. The application deadline is 30 June 2026.

Event: Sara Baume & Emily LaBarge discuss Opening Night
2026-07-01 19:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Paris) | London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Pl, London, WC1A 2JL
Shortly after the pandemic lockdown Sara Baume came across a painting in a pop-up exhibition in a renovated West Cork shed. Fascinated by it, she became determined to make the painter’s acquaintance – although a native of North Dakota the artist Mollie Douthit was now living and working in rural Ireland. Bonded by a common love of nature and a commitment to their respective artistic practices, they began to meet regularly, to talk, to eat and to swim. What would it be like, Baume wondered, to write a book in the style of Mollie’s painting? Opening Night is the result. She will be in conversation with Emily LaBarge, author of Dog Days.

Competition Deadline: The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
2026-07-29
From the competition website:
The Letter Review Prize is an internationally celebrated event, offered every four months in the categories of Short Fiction, Poetry, and Books. We publish our winners, maintain shortlists, submit to The Pushcart, and award over $16,000 USD annually to writers, meaning our prize is among the highest paying literary prizes administered by a literary journal in the world.
Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Anthology Short Story Competition
2026-07-31
From the competition website:
Established to recognise and encourage creative writing and provide a platform for publication, the Anthology Short Story Competition is open to original and previously unpublished short stories in the English language by a writer of any nationality, living anywhere in the world. There is no restriction on theme or style. Stories submitted must not exceed the maximum of 1,500 words. Writers can submit as many entries as they wish. Each submission will require a separate entry form and is subject to a separate entry fee.
Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Southlands Creative Writing Competition 2026
2026-07-31
From the competition website:
Southlands Arts Centre is excited to announce the launch of our annual creative writing competition. We are open for submissions from Sunday, 22nd February.
We are taking entries from over 18s and under 18s. There are life writing and fiction categories.
Continuing with our tradition the fiction category is themed. This year’s theme is architecture. By this we mean, buildings of all kinds — from homes to halls, castles to cabins, all structures and spaces.
Enter here.

Competition Deadline: The Bournemouth Writing Prize
2026-08-15
From the competition website:

Bournemouth has a rich literary heritage. World-renowned writers – from Bram Stoker to Bill Bryson, Mary Shelley to JRR Tolkien, all took inspiration from our seaside oasis on the south coast of Dorset. Originally, Bournemouth was a spa town, attracting people from across the country (and polluted cities!) to use the sea air to revitalise their wellbeing. Where relaxation exists, creativity springs.
Drawing on Bournemouth’s incredible creative scene – including two world-class universities, colleges and language schools – and a thriving, engaged and inclusive creative community, our 2027 writing competition – in partnership with the Bournemouth Writing Prize – invites writers from across the world to be inspired by Bournemouth’s rich literary history to send us entries on any subject.

Short stories (up to 3,000 words)

Poems (up to 30 lines).

The costs to enter are:

£10 for a Short Story (up to 3,000 words)

£10 for up to three poems (up to 30 lines). All poems need to be in one document.

Submit in either Word or PDF.

Enter here.

Event: Lucy Caldwell & Nell Stevens, Short Story Magic
2026-08-22 13:30 - 14:30
BBC National Short Story Award-winning Lucy Caldwell (author of Openings and These Days) and Nell Stevens (author of The Original and Somerset Maugham Award-winning Mrs Gaskell & Me) are both masters at catapulting you into characters’ lives, conjuring entirely new worlds in a matter of pages. In this conversation they discuss their new story collections, Devotions and The Good Time, talking stories of love, grief, haunted lives, emotional crossroads, and irresistible humour with Di Speirs.

Competition Deadline: Oxford Flash Fiction Prize
2026-08-31
From the competition website:

1st Prize: £1000 / 2nd Prize: £200 / New Voice Prize: £200 / 3rd Prize: £100 / Hidden Element Prize £100
Shortlisted entrants will be offered publication in our end of year anthology.

Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
2026-08-31
From the competition website:

Poetry entries should be no more than 40 lines.
Fiction entries should be no more than 2,000 words.
Works published or entered elsewhere are accepted.
We accept works on any theme.
You may enter the Award as many times as you wish, although each work requires a fee and new submission form.

Enter here.

Competition Deadline: Best in Rural Writing Contest
2026-09-01
From the competition website:

Contest submissions may be previously published, and will also be read within 3-4 months of submitting with an eye towards publication on the site, as well as the forthcoming Best in Rural Writing print anthologies. (Note: shortlisting in the contest does not automatically secure a place in the anthology, unless selected as one of the two finalists. The work will be considered by future anthology committees, however). Go to our submit page for more details.
Although the contest and anthology are seperate initiatives, we recommend reading the anthology to get an idea of the type of work that typically gets recognized (and also because it supports The Milk House). You can order a copy here.
Submissions may be up to 7,000 words.

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

Submission Deadline: Special Issue of Short Fiction in Theory & Practice | Writing Across Languages: Anglophone Short Stories by Multilingual Authors
2026-12-01
Special Issue | Writing Across Languages: Anglophone Short Stories by Multilingual Authors
Guest edited by Elsa Court (University of Oxford), Nina Ellis (The American University in Cairo), and Sonya Moor (Manchester Metropolitan University).
In ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ Ernest Hemingway uses a Spanish expression to insinuate the linguistic reality of a geographic location that is experienced only in passing. ‘Dos cervezas,’ says one of his two central characters, a man introduced as ‘the American,’ whom we understand is in a precarious relationship with a younger woman, also a native English speaker. For the duration of the five-page story, the couple sit at a table in the shade of a café while waiting for a train to Madrid, discussing the future of their relationship in coded terms. They continue ordering drinks presumably still in Spanish — but after the mention of ‘Dos cervezas’, this second language is presumed, rather than transcribed. The rest of the story — including further exchanges with the bar owner — is written entirely in English.
The literary fiction landscape has dramatically changed since the time when, as Hilary Mantel put it, a young writer was systematically advised to avoid using foreign language expressions in her prose, for fear of sounding ‘elitist’ to the Anglo-American reader. Moreover, the globalisation of Anglophone creative expression means that not all fiction written in English today is produced from imaginations that think only — or even primarily — in English, even when that is the primary language of their texts.
International, peer-reviewed Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is proud to invite original short-story submissions for a practice-based special issue to be published in September 2027, entitled ‘Writing Across Languages: Anglophone Short Stories by Multilingual Authors’. The issue will bring together inventive works of contemporary short fiction, written primarily in English, but also incorporating interplay with one or more other languages.
The editors invite submissions of up to 5,000 words that make use of at least one language other than English or find ways of gesturing towards other languages within their narratives.
There is no minimum word count.
Deadline for submissions: 1st December 2026.
Please visit the Short Fiction in Theory and Practice website for submission guidelines at: https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice
For informal enquiries please contact Principal Editor Ailsa Cox (coxa@edgehill.ac.uk).
