Genre: Fiction

Center for Fiction Announces Fellows

G&A: The Contest Blog
5.31.17

The Center for Fiction has announced the recipients of the 2017 NYC Emerging Writers Fellowships. Nine awards of $5,000 each are given annually to emerging fiction writers living in New York City.

The 2017 fellows are Amna Ahmad, Charlotte Crowe, Dana Czapnik, Erik Hoel, Andrew Mangan, Crystal Powell, Maud Streep, Alexandra Tanner, and Hubert Vigilla.

In addition to the cash prize, the winners will also receive yearlong studio space at the Center for Fiction in New York City and the opportunity to meet with agents and editors, and will give two public readings. Manuel Gonzales, Alexandra Kleeman, and Téa Obreht judged. Visit the Center for Fiction website to find out more about the winners.

Since 2010, the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writer Fellowship program has supported sixty-two New York City–based early-career fiction writers. Writers living in any of New York’s five boroughs are eligible to apply each year.

(Top row from left: Amna Ahmad, Charlotte Crowe, Dana Czapnik; Middle row: Erik Hoel, Andrew Mangan, Crystal Powell; Bottom row: Maud Streep, Alexandra Tanner, and Hubert Vigilla)

 

Cherry Pie

The Time Is Now
5.31.17

One of the elements that makes David Lynch’s TV show Twin Peaks, which returns with a third season this spring, so unusual is its dreamlike combination of melodrama, horror, humor, and cast of idiosyncratic characters. Its surrealism is emphasized by the repeated appearance of mundane yet mysterious visuals—cherry pie, coffee, logs, and owls—which take on motif-like significance in the series. In literature, authors such as Haruki Murakami and Roberto Bolaño have also mixed the odd with the everyday to similar hallucinatory effect in their books. Jot down a list of objects that have had some sort of resonance in your life, even if they may seem like unexceptional items. Write a short story in which you insert these images throughout the text. Is there an intuitive dream logic that can help guide their placement? Do they have metaphorical potential?

Upcoming Fiction and Nonfiction Contest Deadlines

G&A: The Contest Blog
5.30.17

Fiction and nonfiction writers—if you’re sitting on a finished story, essay, or book-length manuscript of prose, check out the following contests with deadlines in the next week. Each contest offers a cash prize, from $1,000 to $5,000, and includes added benefits such as publication and paid trips to conferences.

American Short Fiction Short Story Contest: A prize of $1,000 and publication in American Short Fiction is given annually for a short story. Lauren Groff will judge. Entry fee: $20. Deadline: June 1.

Crook’s Corner Book Prize: A prize of $5,000 is given annually for a debut novel set in the American South. The winner is also entitled to receive a free glass of wine every day for a year at Crook’s Corner Café and Bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Eligible novels must be set primarily in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, or the District of Columbia. Elizabeth Cox will judge. Entry fee: $35. Deadline: June 1.

Nowhere Magazine Travel Writing Contest: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Nowhere Magazine is given twice yearly for a short story or essay that “possesses a powerful sense of place.” Porter Fox will judge. Entry fee: $20. Deadline: June 1.

Salamander Fiction Prize: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Salamander is given annually for a short story. Christopher Castellani will judge. Entry fee: $15. Deadline: June 1.

Southern Indiana Review Thomas A. Wilhelmus Short Prose Award: A prize of $2,000 and publication by Southern Indiana Review Press is given annually for a chapbook-length story collection, novella, novel excerpt, or work of creative nonfiction. David H. Lynn will judge. Entry fee: $20. Deadline: June 1.

Willow Springs Books Spokane Prize for Short Fiction: A prize of $2,000 and publication by Willow Springs Books is given annually for a short story collection. Entry fee: $27.50. Deadline: June 5.

Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition: A prize of $5,000, publication in the 86th annual Writer’s Digest Competition Collection, and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Writer’s Digest Conference in August in New York City to meet one-on-one with four agents or editors is given annually for a poem, a short story, or an essay. The winner will also be interviewed in Writer’s Digest, and will receive a subscription to the Writer’s Digest Tutorials video series. A second-place prize of $1,000 and publication is also given in each genre, including personal essay, genre short story, literary short story, and inspirational writing. Entry Fee: $30. Deadline: June 1.

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines and submission details. Check out our Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more upcoming contests in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Hisham Matar Wins £20,000 Rathbones Folio Prize

G&A: The Contest Blog
5.26.17

Hisham Matar has won the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize for his memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016). Formerly known as the Folio Prize and given exclusively to fiction books, the annual £20,000 prize is now given for a book in any genre written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the previous year.

The Return, which also won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, follows Matar’s return to his native home of Libya in search of answers to his father’s disappearance. About the book, Folio judges Ahdaf Soueif, Rachel Holmes, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett said, “The Return shows what a novelist at the top of his game can do with nonfiction. It gives the reader the same aesthetic, the same satisfaction of the great literary works that enter our lives and stay with us forever.” In addition to The Return, Matar is the author of two acclaimed novels, In the Country of Men (2008) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2012).

The seven finalists were The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez by Laura Cumming; This Census-Taker by China Miéville; The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan; The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; Golden Hill by Francis Spufford; Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien; and Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution & War by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab. The finalists were chosen from sixty-two books nominated by the Folio Prize Academy, an international group of writers and critics.

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