Deadline: November 1, 2023
Entry fee: $23
About the competition
The Vonnegut Prize is an annual fiction competition intended to recognize the finest speculative fiction, which can include, but is not limited to, work influenced by the postmodern science-fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. We love Vonnegut’s dark humor, but please avoid mere imitation. We are enthusiastic about all work painted with speculative fiction’s broad brush: fairy tale, magical realism, fabulism, the fantastic, horror, Afro-futurism, science fiction hard and soft, and everything in between. The winning entry will appear in the North American Review‘s annual summer issue, and all finalists will be considered for publication.
Competition guideline
- You may submit novel excerpts so long as they stand alone as a complete short story with beginning, middle, and end.
- We will accept flash fiction as well as works up to 10,000 words. That said, most of our finalists and all of our winners have had word counts in the 2,500 – 7,500 range.
- We are interested in experimental fiction; however, if publishing your piece would require unusual layout or formatting, please query first.
- Current University of Northern Iowa students are not eligible to submit.
- Friends of the guest judge and the contest coordinator are not eligible to submit.
- We do allow for multiple submissions to our contests. The $23 contest fee includes a copy of the issue that the winner is published in (a $15 value), so if you submit multiple times, we will send you subsequent issues, rather than multiple copies of the same issue. The Vonnegut winner is published in the Summer issue, so if you submit twice, you would receive a Summer and Fall issue.
- Read the whole guideline and submit an entry here.
