The submission period is now closed.
STORY SUBMISSIONS FOR STORIES OF THE NATURE OF CITIES 2020
Go to the bottom of the page to access the submission form.
The rules are simple. The work must:
(1) be 750 words or less, not including the title (i.e., “sudden fiction” or “flash fiction”);
(2) be fiction, a story (that is, not an essay, poetry, or other form);
(3) be successfully submitted to the organizers no later than 1 January 2020;
(4) be submitted via the contest’s web-based form, below;
(5) be set in a city (the notion of “city” may be liberally interpreted);
(6) include as significant plot elements both nature and people;
(7) be submitted in English (although there may be non-English passages, for reasons of storytelling);
(8) be an original work by the submitter, to which he or she holds the rights;
(9) be previously unpublished, not under consideration in other contests, and remain so during the duration of the contest;
(10) not be racist, sexist, homophobic, gratuitously violent, or otherwise offensive;
(11) Individual authors (under actual name or pseudonym) may submit no more than one work.
(12) Authors must be at least 16 years old as of 1 January 2020.
Beyond these requirements, the work may:
(1) be written by a person of any nationality or country of residence;
(2) be of any style or genre of fiction (realism, surrealism, sci-fi, magical realism, dystopic to utopic);
(3) be set in any location;
(4) be set in the future (near or far) or present.
(5) There are no limitations on the plot or action of the story, other than those mentioned here; visit www.thenatureofcities.com to see some of the issues that motivate us. At TNOC, we are very interested in imagining cities in which nature and people co-exist, cities in which the relationships between the human-made and the natural are imagined differently.
A committee will begin reviewing the stories on 2 January 2020, a process that will continue until April 2020.
SUBMIT YOUR STORY