Writing Competitions deadlines 31 October & 31 January

Thanks to my fellow bloggers Blog About Writing and Displacement Activity for the following competition information:

1. Writers Bureau are running their regular monthly competition and for October they want you to ‘scare them to death’ with your spooky Halloween stories. But, there’s a twist, you have to write a spine tingling chiller in just 140 characters, like you would on Twitter.”

The prize is a fiction writing course, including short stories, novels, TV and theatre and radio dramas.

Send your entry to draw@writersbureau.com by the 31st October 2013

2. Reader's Digest are running their 100 word flash fiction competition again and you’ve got until January 31st 2014 to send them your masterpiece. There’s £1000 for the winner and two runners-up will receive £100 of book tokens.



3. Best magazine is running another short story competition, with a £1000 first prize.
They’re looking for a ‘Christmas’ short story, on the theme of ‘A Christmas Carol’ (which you can interpret in any way you like). The deadline is 26th November.

It’s not exactly free to enter. You need to collect 4 tokens in total (all with different numbers) and attach them to your entry. 1 token can be downloaded from the website, here and the others you’ll need to get from the weekly magazine, over 3 weeks (it’s 89p).

More details here.

In addition to collecting the tokens, you have to include, with your submission ‘the name of a famous author who’ll be mentioned in one of the four stories that will be appearing on bestdaily.co.uk every week’.

Martin Cruz Smith short story competition

 

To promote Tatiana, the new Arkady Renko title from thriller novelist Martin Cruz Smith, publishers Simon & Schuster are running a short story competition. Stories should be up to 2,500 words in length, feature Renko as a character and be titled "London Calling". 

 

First prize is online publication plus a signed first edition of Tatiana as well as copies of Smith's entire back catalogue of novels. Two runners up will also receive online publication. The competition closes on 21st November 2013. There are full details here (.pdf). 

 

 

 

 

University of Aberdeen Special Collections Flash Fiction Competition

 

To support Book Week Scotland, the Special Collections Centre of University of Aberdeen library is running a flash fiction competition. Stories of between 400 and 500 words may be entered, There's no set theme, but the stories should be inspired by one of four images  - these photos are on the competition website - that relate back to the Collections Centre's holdings. 

There's a first prize of £50 in book tokens from Waterstones booksellers. There are also details of a children's competition on the site too. The competitions close for entries on 27th October 2013. The competition home page and entry form - plus the four images mentioned above - is here. Full rules are here (opens as .pdf).