Rather slim pickings this month for competitions – December always seems to be quiet, especially in the UK. Perhaps everyone is saving their creative energy for really great Christmas cards? Anyway, here we are.

• The St Louis Writer’s Guild is again offering the stingiest prize: $15 to enter, but the top prize is $50. Maximum 3,000 words and the deadline is 1 December.
• The Breakwater Review contest, with the same deadline, costs only $10 to enter and offers a decent $1000 prize. You can go up to 4,000 words.
• The Skobeloff competition is free, but your only prize is publication. They want stories of love and romance up to 5,000 words long, and you’ve got until 10 December.
• The Masters Review is looking for chapbooks, between 25 and 45 pages. It’s $25 to enter but you could win $3,000 plus 75 copies of your chapbook to give to friends and relatives. (Or use as a sort of taster with novel submissions? Maybe not.) The deadline is 17 December.
• For the Jacob Zilber prize from Prism magazine you need up to 4,000 words and an entry fee of $35: top prize $1,500, and the deadline is 21 December.

The rest all have deadlines of 31 December, possibly something to fill those empty days between Christmas and New Year.

• The Letter Review has an entry fee of $20 and a top prize of $5,000: stories up to 5,000 words.
• Boulevard magazine will take up to 8,000 and charge $18, offering a prize of $1,500.
• Finally, the Danahy Fiction Prize from the Tampa Review costs $20 to enter with a prize of $1,000. Stories up to 5,000 words.

So ends another year of authorial competition. Merry Christmas!