Genre: Fiction

Deadline Approaches for Black Balloon Book Prize

G&A: The Contest Blog
4.24.13

Submissions are currently open for Black Balloon Publishing’s inaugural Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, an award of $5,000 and a book deal with Black Balloon given for a fiction manuscript. The deadline is May 6. 

Previously unpublished novels and short story collections of at least 50,000 words are eligible. Fiction writers may submit an excerpt of no more than 4,000 words via Submittable by May 6. Those who are selected to move on to the second round of judging will have one week after being notified to submit their final manuscript. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but entrants must notify Black Balloon if a manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere. Short story collections containing previously published stories are eligible. There is no entry fee.
 


According to the Black Balloon editors, “we champion the weird, the unwieldy, and the unclassifiable. We are battle-worn enemies of boredom and we’re looking for books that defy the rules, bend reality, twist preconceptions, and imagine the unimaginable.”

An independent press based in New York City, Black Balloon accepts submissions of literary fiction, nonfiction, and memoir year-round through its online submission form. The press also produces the Airship, a digital daily that features emerging writers from across the country. 

The book prize is named for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a one-eyed and one-armed British naval commander made famous for his victories against the French during the Napoleonic Wars—a man, the Black Balloon editors write, “who defied convention at every turn.” 

A Day in the Life

The Time Is Now
4.24.13

Believable, fully developed characters serve to engage readers and strengthen your stories. Choose a character from one of your stories-in-progress or imagine a character about whom you’d like to write. Compose a character sketch based on a day in the life of this character. Explore every detail of what this person does and why throughout one day. What are his or her morning rituals and routines? How does he or she go about choosing clothes? What does this person eat? What does the inside and outside of his or her car look like? How does he or she walk and what does it say about this person? Where does he or she go and why? Use this sketch to inform the revision or writing of a story.

Submissions Open for Booth Story Prize

G&A: The Contest Blog
4.18.13

The Butler University–based literary magazine Booth is currently accepting short story submissions for its annual literary prize. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Booth. The deadline is May 31. 

Using the online submission system, writers may submit a story between 500 and 7,500 words with a $20 entry fee. All entries will be considered for publication. One runner-up will receive $250. Roxane Gay will judge. Butler University students and staff, as well as friends and students of the judge, are not eligible to enter. 

Established in 2009, Booth publishes two print issues per year, and features one author or new piece of writing on its website every week. The staff is comprised of students in the MFA program at Butler University in Indianapolis. The annual prize alternates genres each year, and the editors accept general submissions, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and comics, from September through April. 

Visit the website for more information and complete submission guidelines, and check out the current installation of Poets & Writers Magazine's Literary MagNet to hear more from the Booth editors about future plans for the journal. 

booth

The current issue of Booth, above, features cover art and interior comics by Dustin Harbin. 

Who Are They?

The Time Is Now
4.17.13

There are two men sitting in the booth of a diner eating dinner together and talking. A woman sits outside in a parked car, watching them through the window. Who are they? What is their relationship to one another? What are the men discussing? What is the woman thinking? What does she do next? Write a story that opens with this scene and explores these questions.

Adam Johnson, Sharon Olds Win Pulitzer Prizes

G&A: The Contest Blog
4.15.13

The Pulitzer Prize board announced the winners and finalists of the 2013 Pulitzer Prizes today in New York City. Of the twenty-one categories, the prizes in letters are given annually for works published in the previous year by American authors.

The winner in fiction is The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House) by Adam Johnson. The finalists were Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf) and Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child (Little, Brown). The winner in poetry is Stag’s Leap (Knopf) by Sharon Olds. The finalists were Collected Poems by the late Jack Gilbert (Knopf) and The Abundance of Nothing by Bruce Weigl (TriQuarterly). The winner in general nonfiction is Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys (Harper) by Gilbert King. The finalists were Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House) and David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (Viking).

Pulitzer Prize Administrator Sig Gissler announced the winners and finalists today at Columbia University. At a ceremony on May 20, each winner will receive $10,000.

The prize board caused a stir last year when it failed to select a winner in fiction, leaving many in the literary world—including Denis Johnson and Karen Russell, who joined the late David Foster Wallace as fiction finalists—feeling slighted, and wondering if this year’s awards would prove different. The 2013 awards were given in all twenty-one categories; visit the website for a complete list of winners.

The Pulitzer Prizes were established in 1911 by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher. A portion of his bequest was used to found the Columbia University School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.

Submissions to be considered for the 2014 prizes will open in May. 

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