Submissions open on July 1st for this year’s Summer Short Story Award for New Writers, and we’re thrilled to announce that Jai Chakrabarti will select our finalists! The winner of the Summer Short Story Award for New Writers will receive a $3,000 prize, along with online publication and agency review. Past winners of this award have signed with agents as a result of this review, and are nominated for anthologies like Best American, Pushcart, Best of the Net and more. Find more about our judge and the full details of the contest below, or on our contest page!
Submissions open July 1st – August 27th
Judging
Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ‘21), which won the National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf ‘23), which was a Good Housekeeping Book of the Month and which the NYTimes described as an “exquisite collection.” His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.
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- Submitted work must be previously unpublished.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.
- The entry fee is $20.
- Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.
- 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.
- 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.
- All submissions must be double-spaced with one-inch page margins and use Times New Roman or Garamond.
- The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PDT on August 27, 2023.
- All entries are considered for publication in New Voices.
- Every submission will receive a response by the end of November. The winners will be announced by the end of the year.
- Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award. Consider submitting to the winter contest instead!
- A significant portion of the editorial letter fee goes directly to your feedback editor.
We don’t have any preferences topically or in terms of style. We’re simply looking for the best. We don’t define, nor are we interested in, stories identified by their genre. We do, however, consider ourselves a publication that focuses on literary fiction. Dazzle us, take chances, and be bold.