International short story competition now open

The Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize 2019 is open to everyone – including writers outside Australia. 

There’s $1,000 up for grabs for the winner of the competition.

This year’s theme is “All Lit Up” and the word limit is 2,500 words.

From the Wollongong Writers Festival website:

Our aim is to bring marginalised issues into the spotlight; think taboo, grey areas, topics only ever spoken about in hushed voices. It’s about time we looked at these subjects in the light of day, don’t you think?

The theme can be interpreted as broadly and playfully as you like. Feel free to experiment with form and content, but please keep submissions within the word count. Entry fee is $15.

The judges for this years’ competition are Effie Carr and Helena Fox. 

According to the Wollongong Writers Festival website:

Effie Car is a Sydney lawyer and Australian writer of Greek- Australian heritage. Her first novel, Stamatia X, was published to acclaim in 2018, a novel about the migrant experience and the themes of cultural, historical and interpersonal trauma and the effect of these on self recognition and self identity. She is a fiction editor of Mascara Literary Review. 

Helena Fox lives in Wollongong, where she mentors and runs writing workshops for young writers. Her debut novel, How it Feels to Float, was published in 2019 by Penguin Random House in North America and Pan Macmillan in Australia/NZ. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in the US. 

Entries close on 1 October 2019 (Australian time, so don’t be fooled, international writers).

So crack those knuckles and get tippy-tapping away on your keyboard to the theme “All Lit Up”.

To find out more and to enter, visit the Wollongong Writers Festival Website.

Good luck!