AWP members can view our full list of curated opportunities on our Contests & Calls web page.
The Griffin Poetry Prize is awarded annually for a first-edition poetry collection written in, or translated into, English by a living poet and/or translator from any country.
Prize: C$130,000
Entry fee: No fee
Deadline: December 19, 2025
Named in honor of InterAct Stroke Support’s beloved patron, the late Ruth Rendell, this biennial short story competition is great chance to get your creative juices flowing.
Prize: £1,000
Entry fee: £15
Deadline: December 21, 2025
The Press 53 Award for Short Fiction is awarded annually to an outstanding, unpublished short story collection.
Prize: $1,000
Entry fee: $30
Deadline: December 31, 2025
The Danahy Fiction Prize is an award of $1,000 and publication in Tampa Review given annually for a previously unpublished work of short fiction.
Prize: $1,000
Entry fee: $20
Deadline: December 31, 2025
Hosted by Farnham Literary Festival, this competition invites the first five pages of a novel and a brief synopsis. It is open to unpublished fiction writers of all genres, with winners receiving cash prizes, critiques, and publication opportunities.
Prize: £1,000 and a critique
Entry fee: £10
Deadline: December 31, 2025
A prize of $1,500 and publication in Boulevard will be awarded to the winning story by a writer who has not yet published a book of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction with a nationally distributed press.
Prize: $1,500
Entry fee: $18
Deadline: December 31, 2025
The Story Unlikely Annual Short Story Contest is back, and for their fifth year, the organizer is giving away $5,000. Story Unlikely is looking for great stories regardless of genre or author pedigree.
Prize: $3,000 first place, $1,000 second place, $750 third place, and $250 for their new reprint category
Entry fee: No fee
Deadline: January 14, 2026
Rattle wants to do for chapbooks what they’ve done for poems with the Rattle Poetry Prize—provide a fair, fun, and friendly way to make the most of what they offer.
Prize: $5,000
Entry fee: $30
Deadline: January 15, 2026
Australian Book Review welcomes entries in the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, worth AU$10,000. The magazine invites essays of all kinds: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental.
Prize: AU$5,000 for first place
Entry fee: AU$20 for current ABR subscribers, $AU30 for standard/nonsubscribers
Deadline: February 2, 2026
The theme of 2025–26’s Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize has been chosen to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Entrants are invited to submit poems on the subject of either “Dystopia” or “Utopia.”
Prize: £1,000
Entry fee: £10
Deadline: February 1, 2026