Writing Spirit 2011 - competition open!

Writing4all is delighted to announce the 3rd Annual Writing Spirit Award for Short Fiction is open.

The competition is open to all nationalities and all genres. The prize-winning stories, along with 25 merited stories will be published in an anthology at the end of the competition.  The prizes are as follows:

First Prize: €1000

Second Prize: €200

Third Prize: €100

Entry fee is €7 per story. Please read the full set of rules and guidelines below before entering.

Deadline Dates

The contest opens 1st March 2011, and runs for four rounds throughout the year. The submission deadlines for both competitions are as follows:

First round: 30th April

Second round: 30th June

Third round: 30th September

Fourth round: 30th November

Each new round begins immediately after the end of the previous round (i.e. you may enter at any time from 1st March to 30th Nov).

At the end of each round, the best stories, as chosen by a panel of judges will be shortlisted for the award. Each round's shortlist will be announced on the Writing4all website (www.writing4all.ie) shortly after the end of each round.

At the end of the competition, the judges will choose the six highest-ranking stories from the shortlists. The top three winning stories will be chosen from these six stories by the Grand Judge, novelist and short-story writer, Christine Dwyer-Hickey. The decisions of the judging panel, and thereafter of the Grand Judges, are final. No correspondence will be entered into in this regard.

About the judge

Christine Dwyer Hickey is an award winning novelist and short-story writer. She is the author of The Dublin Trilogy: The Dancer, The Gambler and The Gatemaker which span the story of a Dublin family from 1913 to 1956. Her novel Tatty was short-listed for Irish Book of the Year in 2005 and was also long-listed for The Orange Prize. Her latest novel, Last Train From Liguria, is set in 1930s Fascist Italy and Dublin in the 1990s and was published in June 2009 by Atlantic Books (UK). The paperback edition of Last Train From Liguria was issued in 2010. Tatty was been nominated for The Irish Book of the Decade competition. She is a member of Aosdana.

Submission Format and Addresses

Story entries should be no more than 4,000 words (but there is no minimum word count) and must be typed, double spaced on one side of A4 (or equivalent) paper. Entries may be submitted by post to:

The Writing Spirit Award 2011

Spade Enterprise Centre

North King Street

Smithfield

Dublin 7

Republic of Ireland

Alternatively, entrants may submit their work by e-mail to info@writing4all.ie Entries must be pasted into the body of the email; attachments will not be opened. Entries must also clearly have the words "The Writing Spirit Award 2011” in their subject lines to prevent being treated as spam.

Receipt of email submissions will be acknowledged. If you have not received an acknowledgement one week after submitting by email, please send a query to info@writing4all.ie

Receipt of postal submissions will also be acknowledged (if an email address is provided in the cover letter). Please allow for the time it will take for postal entries to be received.

Multiple entries are allowed throughout the period of the contest. Entries will be judged anonymously by our judges. You may submit any number of stories and have any number of them on the shortlist.

Entries are welcomed from ALL nationalities, and the judges are keen to see work from as many countries as possible; however, entries must be in the English language.

For further information on rights, and how to pay the €7 entrance fee, visit: http://writing4all.ie/writing-spirit