ENSFR

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).
