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Submit Your Short Story

All Entrants Complete 3 Simple Steps

Don’t forget: If you are aged 25 or under on the 1st May 2026 please enter your date of birth to ensure that your entry, or entries, also qualify for the Cygnature Prize.

We want to avoid having to disqualify your entry, so please ensure you read the competition rules before you submit your story or poem. The key points are:

  • Stories maximum 3000 words. Poems maximum 40 lines.
  • Stories should have double line spacing.
  • Do not put your name, or anything to identify you, on your entry.
  • The filename uploaded must match the title submitted.

To view the complete set of rules click here for stories and here for poems.

Thank you for entering our competition.

 

  • *Student?

    Accepted file types: doc, docx, rtf, txt, odt.

    *Story Title

    • (max file size 1 GB)

    *Story Title 1

    *Story Title 1

    • (max file size 1 GB)
    • (max file size 1 GB)

    *Story Title 1

    *Story Title 2

    *Story Title 3

    • (max file size 1 GB)
    • (max file size 1 GB)
    • (max file size 1 GB)

    *Story Title

    • (max file size 1 GB)

    *Story Title 1

    *Story Title 1

    • (max file size 1 GB)
    • (max file size 1 GB)

    *Story Title 1

    *Story Title 2

    *Story Title 3

    • (max file size 1 GB)
    • (max file size 1 GB)
    • (max file size 1 GB)

    *First Name

    *Last Name

    *Address Line 1

    Address Line 2

    *Town/City

    *Postal Code

    *Country

    Telephone

    *Email Address

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Fran Lock

Poetry Main Prize Judge

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and fourteen poetry collections. Her most recent collections are Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024, and ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Spectres // Defectors /// No Respecters, an omnibus of three previous titles, with selected new material was published by Culture Matters in late 2024.Her most recent pamphlet is The New Herbal (Blueprint Press, 2024), and Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, a collection of essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University 2022-2023 and is a Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters. She lives in Kent with her sassy American bully, Luna.