Month: July 2025

August 2025 Competitions

July 19, 2025

A selection of writing competitions that I might enter with deadlines in August.

  • The Robert Watson Literary Prize, worth $1,000 is from the Greensboro Review. The word limit is 7,500. Entry is only open to subscribers and a subscription is $15: deadline 1 August.
  • The Cream City Review (Milwaukee’s leading literary journal) does it the other way round: entry is $15 and comes with a year’s free subscription. The word limit is 9,000 and the top prize is $500. Enter by 1 August.
  • The Aurora Prize from Writing East Midlands takes up to 2,000 words and charges £9 for entry, with a prize of £500 and a year’s membership of the Society of Authors. The deadline is 6 August.
  • The H.G.Wells Prize looks for stories up to 5,000 words on the theme ‘The Middle Ground’. £10 entry, prize £1,000, deadline 8 August.
  • The Craft First Chapters competition wants your first 5,000 words: entry is $20 and the prize $2,000, closing on 10 August.
  • The Bournemouth Writing Prize looks for up to 3,000 words and will charge you £10, with a prize of £1,000, deadline 15 August.
  • The Black Warrior contest will accept stories up to 6,000 words and it’s $20 to enter. The winning story will be published and there is a cash prize, but I have been unable to find out how much it is, which sort of suggests they’re not proud of it. The deadline is 16 August.
  • Book Pipeline wants your first 5,000 words plus a synopsis. Entry is $45 and the category prize is $2,500. Enter by 20 August.
  • Pen and Quill’s competition is free to enter: you could win $200 plus books and a subscription. They look for 1,500 words on the theme Afterlight/Afterglow (which they explain further on their website). The deadline is 21 August.
  • The Scottish Association of Writers brings us the Westerwood Prize, with a word limit of 2,500 and a £10 entry fee. This year instead of £100 the top prize is dinner, bed and breakfast at the Westerwood Hotel, Cumbernauld’s classiest spa and golf resort. The contest closes on 24 August.
  • A bit of a departure now. Not Quite Write is known for its Flash Fiction contest: now there’s a Flesh Fiction one for erotic stories. Up to 1,500 words, free to enter, with a prize of $500 plus a trophy (not sure what form the trophy takes).
  • Those fine folk at the World History Encyclopaedia are back with their Ink of Ages prize, for stories about history or mythology. Up to 2,000 words, free to enter, and you could win $1,000. In addition one of their artists will do some nice work for your book or story. Enter by 29 August.

All the rest have a deadline of 31 August.

  • First I have to mention the Ajuda Foundation prize, which promotes the worthy cause of mental health support in Wales. Stories, which can be up to 2,000 words, must be related to themes of mental health and wellbeing. £10 to enter, a prize of £100.
  • The Oxford Flash Fiction competition takes pieces up to 1,000 words: it’s £7 to enter and the prize is £1,000.
  • Aesthetica is back yet again looking for 2,000 words and an entry fee of £18. Win £2,500 plus subscriptions and a course.
  • Publishing Lab, from New Orleans, wants a novel or collection and for a $28 fee offers a hefty $10,000 prize.
  • Saveas wants stories up to 3,500 words on the theme ‘Facing the Storm’, entry fee £5, first prize £200.
  • The Cisco Writers Club have a limit of 2,500 words, fee of $5 and prize of $100.
  • The LA Review has the same word limit but charges a little more, at $20: however, their prize is a full $1,000

If you get anywhere with any of these, do let me know.

Grayson Perry Delusions

July 18, 2025

Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection is an exhibition in which Grayson Perry reacts to the items in the museum. It got lukewarm reviews when it opened, perhaps because of a lack of coherence. Certainly Perry makes things complicated. We know that context changes the significance and even the value of art, and he likes to control that context by inventing new artists to be the ‘creators’ of some of his work – arguably even ‘Grayson Perry’ is one. Here apart from personas we have seen before he introduces the artist Shirley Smith, also the deluded Honourable Millicent Wallace who believes herself to be the true heir to the Wallace Collection. This opens the way to many reflections on the palatial and the ladylike. He complicates things further by bringing in the work of two real outsider artists, Madge Gill (whose stuff was exhibited here in its own right when the galleries had been emptied in WWII) and Alois Corbaz. So there is no simple story to the exhibition: but how could there be? The collection is complex and so is Perry, and this is the shadow thrown by the former on the latter (or vice versa, or both). This unmanageable complexity is acknowledged right at the beginning by a figure of a Man of Stories who has narrative threads literally bursting out of him.

Coherent or not, Perry is never uninteresting, and there are some nice things here, notably a helmet and figure in armour that are a tribute to the Wallace’s formidable collection of arms and armour, but also great objects in themselves. The ‘tapestries’ Perry goes in for these days are less successful in my eyes. Whisper it quietly, but perhaps the best stuff is the pots.

Not for everyone – you probably know already whether you like Perry’s stuff or not – but I enjoyed it.

Hiroshige

July 17, 2025

I suppose Hiroshige is the second name that comes to mind when you think of Japanese artists. I had him down mentally as a pretty straight landscape man. However, the current show at the British Museum is amazing and shows him to have been the creator of pictures of huge originality and impact, really second to none. His animals are terrific, and those landscapes are powerfully evocative. He has a particular gift for misty distances which provides a great complement to the hard outlines of printmaking.

Not to be missed if you like ukiyo-e at all.

Rolls

July 13, 2025

These granary bread rolls were made with a dash of olive oil, and they taste pretty good – but yes, they do bear an unfortunate resemblance to a certain emoji. They will, I believe, nicely complement some more yellow courgette soup.