Home of the Ghost Story Awards
Submissions to our biannual fiction contest, with cash awards of $1,000, $250, and $100, continue to pour in from all over the world! The winners will be published here on the summer solstice. If you’re planning on entering, you need to submit your story via our online submission system by the end of April. You’ll find the submissions link, as well as full guidelines to our contest, on our Guidelines page.
Good luck!
Winter solstice marks the official start of our annual Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition for short supernatural fiction of up to 1,000 words. And what better image than Stonehenge to use in announcing our competition, given that writers from Britain took all three cash prizes last year? We’re wondering if this was just a fluke, or whether the Brits can do it again. . . .
If you’ve got a short yarn ready to be read, or are thinking of writing a miniature supernatural tale—you’ve got until January 31, after all—you just might want to have a look at our contest guidelines. Good luck!
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition is now closed to submissions. Response was fantastic, with story entries pouring in from around the world. Thanks to everyone who participated. We’ll be announcing (and publishing) our winner and two honorable mentions on October 31. Visit our contest page for information about the next Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition.
This terrific anthology published in Durham, England contains an entire section of haikus related to ghosts and the supernatural by The Ghost Story’s editor, Paul Guernsey, and many other poets with an interest in the uncanny. Have a look.
The international scope of The Ghost Story contest continues to expand. This time around, not only did we receive submissions from eight countries, but our Honorable Mention story is by an Australian writer, and one of our two Second Honorable Mention pieces comes to us from Finland.
There were also more submissions than ever before, and the high quality of so many of them made judging the contest a difficult task. In fact, we wound up with two Second Honorable Mentions not because we planned it that way, but because we loved them both, and in the end, despite the added expense of the extra prize money, we just could not bear to choose between them.
What is especially fascinating about the four stories we’re publishing here is the each one takes a completely different approach to the supernatural, and each uses the otherworldly for a different literary purpose. For instance, our overall winner—and recipient of the competition’s $1,000 cash award—presents us with a protagonist who is haunted by the traumas of his childhood as well as by the ghost of jazz musician Louis Armstrong, who serves as his own personal spirit guide. Our Honorable Mention story gives us a new mother whose fears for her baby’s safety coalesce into the physical form of a pair of strange children who appear on her doorstep in the middle of the night. One of our Second Honorable Mentions speculates about the problems, romantic and otherwise, that might be faced by someone who was born as a ghost, rather than having had to die to get that way, and our other Second Honorable Mention offers a harrowing situation—a mentally unbalanced teenager armed with a butcher knife—that is nonetheless so funny that we find ourselves laughing out loud every time we read it.
Come on inside to help us celebrate our winners, and to enjoy a chilling summertime read.
And if you’re planning to submit a supernatural story to the next Ghost Story contest, we’ll start accepting entries again at the beginning of August—and we’re looking forward to reading yours!
Finally, if you’d like to leave a comment, or to discuss our stories or the contest in general, please visit our Facebook page.
Writers in Britain obviously have a knack for the supernatural. In The Ghost Story‘s new Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition, which concluded January 31, all three cash awards for flash fiction (short-short stories of under 1,000 words) on a supernatural or magic realism theme went to authors living in England and Scotland.
Scroll down through TGS‘s Home Page to read these three fine stories.
Winning honors in the competition—and its $300 first prize—went to CL Dalkin, a librarian living on the south coast of England, for her story, “A Brief Respite.”
First Honorable Mention and a $100 cash award went to Barry Charman, of North London, for his story, “Palette.”
And Second Honorable Mention, with a $50 prize, was taken by Stuart Riding of Edinburgh, Scotland, for “Kitsune.”
Our next fiction contest is The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, for which we begin accepting submissions on February 15. Prizes are $1,000, $250, and $100 for full-length short stories of between 1.500 and 10,000 words.
Stories poured in from the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. The winning pieces—one that’s at once bittersweet and spooky, three others that are entirely unnerving—are set in wartime Japan, in rural Scotland, in suburban America, and in the dark hill country of the American South.
And the winning writers are as varied as their work: A well-known author who has won many prestigious awards, a 29-year-old from the West Coast who never previously published a word and is now publishing two stories here, and an Australian native now living in, and inspired by, Scotland.
Come on in and have a read—but be warned: Afterward, you may feel like sleeping with the lights on for a while.
In reality, a supernatural story isn’t all that different from any other piece of short fiction. Most of the same good, technical practices apply for creating any tale that is truly memorable. Nonetheless, writers of stories that contain a supernatural element do face a few additional hurdles that need to be surmounted. For just one example, how do you structure and pace your story so that your readers remain with you for the complete ride, that delightfully icy feeling running up and down their backs the entire time?
As it is once again the season in which a lot of writers are polishing their submissions for The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, we thought this would be an ideal time to offer an array of tips on writing, revising, and presenting ghost stories, vampire stories, horror stories, fantasy stories, literary magic realism, and other tales with a strong supernatural kick. But keep in mind that most of the advice we give here will be effective regardless of the fiction genre in which you’re working. [Read more…] about HOW TO WRITE A GRIPPING SUPERNATURAL STORY
The competition was ferocious—especially considering that this is the first time we’ve run this contest. Of course, the high quality of the submissions probably had at least something to do with the fact that the winner was going to walk—or in this instance, dance—away with $1,000. . . .
In any case, out of an impressive selection of short stories sent to us by writers from around the U.S. and Canada, we’ve chosen three, as Winner, Honorable Mention, and Second Honorable Mention, that really astonished us. Come on inside for the names of the winners, and to enjoy a chilling summertime read.
Ghost Hour. Illustration: Alice Popkorn
The contest is now closed to submissions. Thanks to everyone who participated. We’ll be announcing (and publishing) our winner and honorable mention on Midsummer’s Eve, in June. Visit our contest page for information about the next Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition.
If you’re a writer of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror, or magic realist fiction, beware the witching hour as April 30th draws to a close. That’s when we’ll stop accepting entries to the short fiction competition in which we will award $1,000 to the writer of the best supernatural story, and $100 for an honorable mention. Of course, we’ll also publish both stories here on TGS.
If you’ve already submitted your tale, we’ll be in touch with you about the results by the end of May. And if you’re still working on your piece, keep at it; the more polished your prose, the better your chances, and you’ve still got a few days left. But don’t let the sand run out of the hour glass; that midnight bell inevitably will toll.
And if you’re still thinking about it, you might want to have a look at our complete contest guidelines.
Good luck!