Call for Submissions: Banshee: A Literary Journal

Submissions for issue #20 will be open from 1-31 March 2025.

Clara Kumagai as our fiction editor for issue #20 (autumn/winter 2025).

Clara Kumagai is from Ireland, Japan and Canada. Catfish Rolling, her debut novel, was a 2024 YOTO Carnegie Medal nominee, and winner of the 2024 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her second novel, Songs for Ghosts, is forthcoming in March 2025. She lives and writes in Ireland. She says:

I am delighted to be the guest fiction editor for the 20th issue of Banshee – what an honour to be part of such an anniversary!

The theme I’ve chosen for this issue is ‘Speculative Fiction, or It doesn’t have to be this way’. It was Ursula K. LeGuin who coined this as a simple summary of what fantasy and sci-fi can achieve: a way of looking at the world and ourselves and imagining how else they might be. It is playful, she said, and it is also subversive.

What excites me about speculative fiction is not really magic wands, elves or spaceships, but its ability to examine our world through the lens of another. I want stories that illuminate with a new light; that bring us closer to the familiar through the strange; that demonstrate humanity through what at first appears alien. I hope for fiction that experiments with form as well as content, and pays as much attention to the sentence as the world-building. So send your stories of the uncanny, weird, fabulist; the what-ifs of the past, present or future; of this world or new ones that might be in ways of your own imagining.

• Banshee welcomes submissions from both Irish and international writers of any background, including first-time writers. We welcome work from members of groups or communities typically under-represented within literature, whether or not the work addresses this.

• All submissions should be previously unpublished.

• Our guideline word count for stories and essays is max 5000 words. Flash fiction should be under 1000 words, poems no more than 40 lines.

• We are happy to read: one story or one essay or two flashes or up to four poems. Please only submit in one category per submissions period.

• Submissions should be in one .doc or .docx attachment. Prose submissions should be double-spaced.

• Please include a third-person bio (max 50 words) in the body of your email. If you are sending a prose submission, please note the word count of the piece in the body of the email.

• Email to:

 subs dot bansheelit at gmail dot com, 

indicating the category of your submission in the subject line (e.g. Flash/Story/Essay/Poetry).

• We are happy to consider simultaneous submissions, but ask that you notify us as soon as your work is accepted elsewhere.

• Please note that we cannot offer feedback on unsuccessful submissions.

• We believe in paying writers. We can offer contributors a small fee as well as a copy of the journal.