Fiction Competition: Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

About the Flannery O'Connor Award
More than fifty short-story collections have appeared in the Flannery O'Connor Award series, which was established to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership. The first prize-winning book was published in 1983; the award has since become an important proving ground for writers and a showcase for the talent and promise that have brought about a resurgence in the short story as a genre. Winners are selected through an annual competition that attracts as many as three hundred manuscripts.

Winners of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction include such widely read authors as Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Rita Ciresi,and Mary Hood.

Submission Guidelines: 2012 Competition
New in 2012: We will only be accepting electronic submissions to the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction this year. See details below.
Dates for submission: Manuscripts may be submitted between 9:00 a.m. on April 2 and 9:00 a.m. on June 1. Winners will be announced by the end of August.
Our online submissions manager is available here.
Tech support for using the submissions manager is available at 1-406-480-6274. The $25 entry fee can be paid online via credit card or PayPal.
Selection process: Each of five contest judges reads approximately one-fifth of the manuscripts submitted to the competition, with a sixth judge available if needed based on the total number of submissions. Judges select seven to ten finalists each; the pool of finalist manuscripts is read by series editor Nancy Zafris, who makes the final selection of two winning manuscripts. Authors of winning manuscripts receive a cash award of $1,000, and their collections are subsequently published by the University of Georgia Press under a standard book contract.

Eligibility: The competition is open to writers in English, whether published or unpublished. Writers must be residents of North America.
Manuscript Guidelines

Manuscripts should be 40,000-75,000 words in length.
The award recognizes outstanding collections of short fiction. Collections may include long stories or novellas (est. length of a novella is 50-150 pages). However, novels or single novellas will not be considered.
Please be sure manuscript pages are numbered.
Please include a table of contents.
Please use a standard, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman in twelve-point size.
Stories included in the submission may have appeared previously in magazines or anthologies but may not have been previously published in a book-length collection of the author’s own work.
Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition for consideration as long as no material is duplicated between submissions. Each submission will require a separate entry fee.
Manuscripts under consideration for this competition may be submitted elsewhere at the same time. Please withdraw your manuscript if it is accepted by another publisher and should no longer be considered for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award competition. Withdrawal can be completed via the submissions manager website. Entry fees are not refundable.

Blind review: The intent of this contest is that manuscripts will be considered on the merits of the fiction and that judges will not be aware of the names or publication records of the authors.

Please do not include your name on the pages of the manuscript—only in the form boxes of the electronic submission manager. The first page of the manuscript should include the title of the collection only.
Please do not include a list of acknowledgments crediting where stories have been published.
Judges who recognize work will recuse themselves, and the submission will be reassigned to a different judge.

Confirmation of receipt and notification: You should receive an e-mail confirmation immediately after submission. An announcement of winners and finalists will be sent to all entrants via e-mail by the end of August.

If you have any questions or concerns other than technical issues with the submissions manager, please contact us via e-mail:

 atpress(at)ugapress.uga.edu (Change (at) to @.)
The press will not accept phone calls regarding the Flannery O’Connor Award.

Statement of Integrity: The University of Georgia is thoroughly committed to academic integrity in all of its endeavors, and the University of Georgia Press adheres to all University of Georgia policies and procedures. To help ensure the integrity of the competition, manuscripts are judged through a blind review process. Judges in the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction competition are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds.