2024 NWF/joanne burns Microlit Award - short Australian stories

Finalists announced!

Co-sponsors of the 2024 joanne burns Microlit Awards, Newcastle Writers Festival and Spineless Wonders, are delighted to announce the finalists selected by award judge Cassandra Atherton.

The finalists in the National category are:

Winners of both categories will be announced early in 2024. They will each receive a cash prize of $300.

Remnant, a Microlit anthology, edited by Cassandra Atherton is due for release in March 2024 and will be available for purchase from this website as well as from bookstores nationally.

Proudly co-sponsored by:

The 2024 NWF/ joanne burns Microlit Awards ***NOW CLOSED***

Theme: REMNANT

Length: 200 word max.

Closing date: July 30 2023

Prizes: $300 for both National and Hunter winners, plus publication of all finalists

We are looking for remnant-themed writing for the thirteenth annual joanne burns Microlit Awards.

Co-hosted by Newcastle Writers Festival and specialist microliterature publisher, Spineless Wonders, this award offers cash prizes and publication.

The award will be judged this year by the celebrated and award-winning author, joanne burns and the publication will be edited by internationally renowned microlit expert, Professor Cassandra Atherton.

Send us microfiction or prose poems, up to 200 words, which reflect on some form or aspect of remnant – whether this is a remnant of wilderness or the natural world, the remains of an urban environment, a vestige of a past way of life, the leftovers of a particular professional or personal experience, the tail end of a loved one’s existence, a powerful memory, a valued keepsake or symbolic object, a spectral or ghostly presence, or an emotion that remains after circumstances have changed. You may invoke ideas of leavings, stubs, lees or dregs. You may celebrate the persistence of what’s valuable. You may evoke the power of recollection. You may conjure with the uncanny.

Whatever the case, send us an evocation from one of microliterature’s many haunted places. Challenge our sense of the real. Show us the past’s power. We welcome submissions that will amaze and unsettle.

On MicroLit by joanne burns: poetry, fiction, essay, contemplation, perhaps flirtation – condensed, sudden, gnomic, implosive – a kind of petit pointillism – where enough may be more than enough ….

National category submissions, here. Hunter category submissions, here.

Entry conditions:

Submissions will only be accepted via the Submittable links.
Entry fee is $15.00 for National category. (Please note: only one submission per entry. There is no limit to the number of entries per person.) Submit here. Entry for the Hunter category is free. Limit of three submissions per entry. Submit here.
Entrants must be over 18 years of age and must be either an Australian citizen (living anywhere) or a person residing in Australia.
Entries will be judged anonymously. The author’s name must not appear on the manuscript.
The judge’s decisions will be final. No correspondence will be entered in to.
Entries are to be no more than 200 words (exclusive of the title).
Submissions under consideration by another competition or publication or work that has been previously published or awarded will not be accepted.
By entering this competition, writers grant Spineless Wonders and the Newcastle Writers Festival limited, fee-free, licence to publish their work and/or produce and broadcast it as audio or video. Intellectual Property shall remain with individual author on the understanding that the work not be published elsewhere until after December, 2024.
The closing date is 30 July, 2023. Entries will be accepted up until midnight AEST. Late entries will not be accepted.
Results will be announced by February, 2024.
Spineless Wonders will offer publication to the winner and finalists in its annual anthology. All published entries, including the winner, may be edited.

For any further inquiries, email info[at]shortaustralianstories[dot]com[au]