International Short Story Competition 2009
October 11th, 2008 | Published in Opportunities | 7 Comments
Rules of the competition
The competition is free and open to all aged 18 or over, regardless of nationality or country of residence.
Entries must be:
- in English
- double-spaced
- in a normal font size (12 point is fine)
Entries must be entirely your own work and never previously published or broadcast, online or offline.
One entry per person only. Subsequent entries, including revisions, will be omitted from the competition and will not be read.
Entries submitted on behalf of somebody else, e.g. posthumously, will not be eligible.
Manuscripts must show no name, address or identifying marks other than the title of the story. Those are for the entry form only.
Word limit this year: 8,000.
There is no set theme.
Entry is by completing the online entry form and uploading your manuscript in Microsoft Word (“.doc”) or RTF (“.rtf”) format.
To enter you must first register and confirm your email address. By so registering you agree that we may email you announcements about the competition and occasional newsletters. We will not pass your details to anyone outside of the Willesden Herald and Pretend Genius Press, unless required to do so by law.
Opening date for submissions: 1 September 2008
Closing date: 19 December 2008
Pulp.net, Pretend Genius and Willesden Herald people and this year’s judges are excluded from the competition, as are members of their immediate families.
We will not enter into any correspondence about the competition, including the rules, selections, formats, receipt of submissions or results.
We cannot provide any feedback on individual entries.
We will reduce the entries to a short list, from which the winners will be chosen anonymously by this year’s judge.
The results will be announced early in 2009. The short list and winner will be announced simultaneously online. The prizewinners will be notified by email at the same time.
The prizes for 2009 are:
1st place: £150 plus a one-off Willesden Herald mug inscribed “The Willesden Short Story Prize 2009″
2nd: 2 x £100 (two runners up)
The three winning stories will be published in a special edition of Pulp.net.
All short-listed stories, including the winners, will be eligible for publication in the New Short Stories anthology series (optional).
Author compensation for inclusion in New Short Stories is limited to 2 complimentary copies of the anthology.
Worldwide copyright of each entry remains with the author.
We reserve the right to withold the prizes and/or reduce the short list numbers if entries of a sufficient standard are not received.
This is a FREE competition, meaning free to enter. All for the love of the short story. As we said before, this is the first literary entity since Shakespeare to offer you both love and immortality.
By submitting an entry you agree to accept these rules in full.
October 22nd, 2008at 8:25 pm(#)
Dear Sirs,
I have made many attempts in the past 24 hours to submit my short story, FAME IS THE SPUR, for the 2008 competition. I would like to know if it has arrived. i suspect it hasn’t. If not, could I submit it as an ordinary e-mail attachment (to what email address?)?.
Kind regards,
Ray Flanagan
October 31st, 2008at 6:36 pm(#)
Dear Sirs,
Could you please tell me why this competition is for 18’s and overs.
Thank you
Benjamin
November 4th, 2008at 4:58 pm(#)
THE LAUGHING GUAVA TREE
I am a Guava Tree growing in an orchard in Africa. I came to Africa from a Caribbean island. I was transported in the stomach of a sailor who plucked my fruit from a Guava tree beside a swift flowing river. He had been told that Guava fruit is also medicine for its eater.
We give humans medicine from our bark, food and vitamins from our fruits. We clean dirty air and produce clean air for people to breathe. We love being trees. Sometimes we hear birds, people, snakes and monkeys saying to themselves; “Trees must be bored to death! They remain stuck on one spot for a lifetime! They can’t move around and see the world like us.”
That is not true! We move around and see places. It’s just that we don’t travel the way snakes, worms, people and birds do.
We trees move around. Guava trees for instance, produce beautiful sweet fruits with many seeds. We hide in our seeds, and if people or animals pluck and eat our fruits, we remain in their tummies and go with them wherever they go. Some times we float in streams and go to far away places.
Monkeys take us to the jungle, humans takes us to the city. We visit different countries on free rides! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Isn’t that fun?
We travel without paying train, bus, air or ship fares!
The wind plays a special music which only trees hear. When the wind blows, we dance, laugh and clap our many hands. People call our hands “branches”.
People think we trees are lonely. No! We are never lonely. We receive visitors always. Some of our visitors stay with us for rest of their lives. The woodpecker makes holes in which she lays eggs in our trunks. The weaver bird weaves our leaves with bits and pieces of grass and little twigs makes nests on our branches. Monkeys spend the whole day playing on our branches. They swing from one branch to the next, shouting and laughing. Sometimes they bend our branches and cause us pain. We shout out, but they don’t hear us.
We love insects a great deal, especially bumble bees. Insects come to us seeking nectar from our flowers. We hear their songs of admiration. They sing about the beauty of our flowers and their wonderful aroma. Bumble bees dance in excitement. Their dance helps our flowers blossom.
Trees do no harm to anybody. We are everyone’s friend. But some people are not our friends. They come with chainsaws and cut us down, after which they cut us into slices. They peel our skins and force nails into us in order to make us into objects. Some people make us walking sticks, others turn us to tables and beds. They forget that we are living things too. They don’t need our bodies to make these objects. The rubber tree has promised the people of the world, that it is ready to produce enough sap to make enough items with in place of wood.
We are not here for only people. Animals too, depend on us. The whole world depends on us. I, the Laughing Guava Tree! I am as important as the president of any nation. Let me tell you a secret: “trees have been learning how to speak human languages for sometime now and have learnt so many languages. We have Hausa, Spanish, Korean, Ga, English, Igbo, Hindi, French, Yoruba, Arabic and Swahili speaking trees. There is no language that trees cannot speak. But people often don’t understand us. We shout across continents to trees in the Amazon jungle and they shout back at us, trees in Denmark, Congo, Mexico, Australia and Burma daily. We hear the cries of the wives and husbands and the children of trees whenever they are being cut in large numbers to be made into tables, roofing planks and even boats. We cry out together at their pain. We need a human voice today. children’s voices the most. We shall put together the voices of all children in the world, voices of Chinese, Africa, European, Indian, American and Alaskan children and make it into one loud voice. Every tree, in every forest, park or garden, every tree turned to a table, walking stick, or bed shall speak out. You could be lying on your bed and hear it speak to you in your mother tongue.
The African woman with a bundle of sticks on her head, going home to cook her dinner would hear them say: “Please try gas, kerosene, or cow dung or even solar energy. Write to your son in the city and tell him to send you stove!. If you must use wood, please cut tree branches only.”
Perhaps what would surprise people the most would be those wooden sculptures in galleries and homes. They will tell people where the trees from which they were made were cut, and the pain they went through from the chipping of axes and chisels in the process of being carved into a mask or a figurine. They would tell their owners how they screamed and yet their sculptors didn’t hear them! I, the Guava Tree, have been providing beautiful shade to the owner of a logging company in Africa, he loves relaxing under my shade in his garden and sleeping after a hard days’ work. I have been protesting to him for long now. But he can’t hear me. I have been trying to tell him to stop logging and start selling rubber or even plastics!
We trees love to dance, sing and laugh to the music of the wind. The music we dance to can cause buildings to lose their roofs, or even collapse. We want to be safe too. Can we strike a compromise? You protect us, and in turn, we provide you fruits, medicine, shade and clean air and protection from wind storms.
Have you ever wondered how the world would be without us?
September 29th, 2009at 2:42 pm(#)
I wish to participate in the competition.
October 8th, 2009at 4:52 pm(#)
They say its free but there is an entry fee and some details on this ad are not the same with the details on the site
February 8th, 2010at 6:41 pm(#)
Please is this competition open for the year 2010? Please kindly reply to my mailbox… Thank you
February 8th, 2010at 7:53 pm(#)
Please go to http://www.willesdenherald.com/competition/howtoenter.php to find out details of the competitions. Always follow the links and email adresses in these announcements.