Seen and Done

Here’s my regular look at writing competitions I might enter during the coming month.. 

• The Scottish Association of Writers has the Westerwood competition for stories of 2-3,000 words. Entry is £7 with a parsimonious prize of £100. The deadline is 5 August.
• Uncharted Magazine wants 1,001 to 5,000 words. Entry is $20 and the prize a more generous $2,000. Stories must be on the theme ‘The Aftermath’, and in one of the three genres they publish: SF/F, Thriller/Horror and Mystery/Crime. The deadline is 6 August.
• Gival’s regular contest is with us again: 5-15,000 words, entry $25, top prize $1,000, enter by 8 August.
• Periscope wants briefer stories, up to 1,500 words, on the theme ‘Identity’. £10 entry, first prize £1,000 and the deadline is 15 August.
• Louise Walters is back with the competition based on page 100 of your novel. It’s £5 to enter: no money prize but a full editorial report and a box of books. Deadline 20 August.
• The Summer version of the Masters Review competition is back – up to 6,000 words, $20 to enter and a prize of $3,000. The deadline is 27 August.

All the rest have a deadline of 31 August.

• Creative Writing Ink wants up to 3,000 words, entry is £9 and the prize £1,000.
• Bit of a fanfare for the University of New Orleans’s Publishing Laboratory, who are offering a prize of $10,000 plus publication. For that they want a full-length novel or collection (no word or page limit) and an entry fee of $28.
• On a more modest scale, Anthology wants a maximum of 1,500 words, for an entry fee of £18 and a prize of £1,000.
• Letter Review looks for up to 5,000 words. Your £20 entry fee gets you access to a £1,000 prize pot to be split three ways – so £333.33, I suppose.
• Aesthetica Magazine puzzles me slightly, because it seems to be an avant-garde publication about art and design rather than a literary one. But the competition claims former winners have gone on to great success. It’s £18 to enter, with a prize of £2,500. Up to 2,000 words. 
• The Kenneth Patchen award is for an innnovative, experimental novel of any length. $25 to enter, win $1,000 and publication.
• St Lawrence look for a collection of 120-280 pages. $28 gets you a shot at $1,000.

Good luck if you enter any of these, and do let me know if you get anywhere!