Breaking: Colin Barrett will serve as guest judge for The Masters Review‘s 2024 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers! Barrett will be tasked with selecting his top three pieces from a shortlist of fifteen provided by TMR staff. Get your manuscripts of prose under 6,000 words polished up before this year’s deadline. The contest will be open from July 1 to August 25. Find out more on our contest page, or read our past winners for inspiration. We can’t wait to read your work!
Colin Barrett is a writer from Ireland. He is the author of the short story collections Young Skins and Homesickness, and a novel, Wild Houses. Homesickness was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and Young Skins won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His work has been published in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Granta, and The Stinging Fly. In 2015, Barrett was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35.”
Colin says, “I am delighted to judge this year’s Summer Short Story Award for The Masters Review. I first found my footing as a writer in the medium of the short story. It is a stark and yet accommodating form, a form of inward audacity, requiring the highest levels of technique, ingenuity, and measuredness, but above all it is a form that demands absolute conviction. I hope to see that conviction in the pages of the submitted stories.”
Submission Guidelines
- The first-place winner receives $3,000, online publication, and agency review.
- The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agency review.
- Submissions of fiction or nonfiction must be under 6,000 words.
- Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
- The entry fee is $20.
- Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.
- Writers from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups are invited to submit for free until we reach fifty submissions in this category.
- If your submission is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the piece is no longer available.
- We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest, but the guest judge will read the shortlist anonymously.
- This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors.
- International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English. Some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- No translations, please.
- All submissions must be double-spaced with one-inch page margins and use Times New Roman or Garamond 12.
- The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PDT on August 25, 2024.
- All entries are also considered for publication in New Voices.
- Every submission will receive a response by the end of December 2024. The winners will be announced by the end of January 2025.
- AI-generated submissions will be automatically disqualified.
- Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award. Consider submitting to the winter contest instead!