Seeking a Short Story Competition
Eddie Walsh from the sadly defunct Emerald Writing Workshops competitions has refunded entry fees for his competitions that
would have closed later in the year. So now I’ve got £3.60 to use as the entry fee in another contest. So I’ve been looking around to see what there is with a £3 to £4 entry fee and discovered the following selection of short story competitions:
- Monthly ‘Writing Magazine’ Competitions - £3 for subscribers and £4 for non-subscribers but I’m going to give these a miss because, as a subscriber, I can enter the contests in the Writers’ News section of the magazine for free (I’ve unofficially set myself the challenge of entering the WN comp. each month & have managed 3 so far, with th 4th in the pipeline).
- Monthly ‘Writers’ Forum Competitions - £3 for subscribers and £6 for non-subscribers, plus there is the option of paying an additional £5 for a critique. This is a possibility but I know I’ll be tempted by the critique and a total of £8 is a lot for one competition.
- Dickens Bicentenary Writing Competition - £3 per prose piece/£2 per poem. Entries to be inspired by a character from a Charles Dickens novel. Closes 15th August 2012. Not for me – I’ve read very little Dickens so unless I went for Scrooge, I wouldn’t know who to base my hero on.
- The Word Hut 5th Short Story Writing Competition - £4 entry fee with prizes of £50, £25, £10. 1,000 words and an open theme. Closes 16th September 2012. I’ll give this one some thought and have a look through my ‘stock’ of 1,000 word stories.
- Speakeasy Open Creative Writing Competitions - £4 per story/£3 per poem with prizes of £125, £75 and £50 in each category. 2,100 words and an open theme. Closes 31st October 2012. This is another one for me to consider but I might have to write something new to meet the word count – most of my stuff seems to be shorter.
And if you’re looking around for other competitions to enter a good resource (which I’ve used in my searching) is the Writers’ Reign website.
Good Luck!
Leave a Reply
Thanks for those links, Sally. As you say, it’s sad about Eddie’s comps.
Hi Sallly, shame about Emerald Eddie, but he may resurface! I really like the idea of targeting competitions with only so much to spend – nice blog. I did the same thing with Writing Mag/Writers News and entered 1 story a month for a year. Amazingly my final story won (Adult Fairy) – so it did pay off, and of course I generated 12 new stories. Trying the same with Writer’s Forum, but no luck so far. Hope you find a good home for your entry fee
Hi Sally, good luck with your competition entries. There’s one over at choc-lit.com as well, the theme is hero’s and I’m sure it’s £3.00 to enter.
Thanks for the tip-off, Susan.
Thank you Sally or some useful information on where to send short stories. I am only in the process of starting to write and hope to enter some of the competitions. Good luck with your entries.
Mary
Good Luck to you too, Mary!