Contests

Salamander 2025 Fiction Prize

First Prize: $1,000 and Publication
Second Prize: $500 and Publication

$20 Reading Fee: Includes One-Year Subscription

Final Judge: Helen Phillips

SUBMISSIONS OPEN FROM MAY 1 – JUNE 1, 2025

•  All entries will be considered for publication. All entries will be considered anonymously.

•  Send no more than one story per entry. Each story must not exceed 30 double-spaced pages or 7500 words in 12 point font. Multiple entries are acceptable, provided that a separate reading fee is included with each entry.

•  Please submit a separate cover sheet with each entry, containing the title of the story and your name, address, phone number, and email. Your name or any other identifying characteristics should not appear anywhere on the story itself.

•  Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but the contest fee is non-refundable if the submission is withdrawn. Please notify the editors as soon as possible if a submitted story is accepted elsewhere.

•  Previously published works and works accepted for publication elsewhere cannot be considered. Salamander’s definition of publishing includes electronic publication.

•  Salamander will not consider work from anyone currently or recently (within the past 4 years) affiliated with Suffolk University or the prize judge.

Contest results will be posted on salamandermag.org by September 1.

•  Contest reading fee includes a one-year subscription. We will send your subscription to the address given unless instructed otherwise. If more than one subscription is purchased, additional subscriptions may be gifted to another reader. International addresses will receive a one-year online subscription; those who prefer a print subscription, please add $20 for subscription postage.

WE ARE ONLY ABLE TO ACCEPT ONLINE SUBMISSIONS IN 2025. We apologize for any inconvenience, and thank you for your understanding.

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum, a Slate Top 10 Book of 2024, an Economist Best Book of 2024, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her novel The Need was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.