With a creaking of floorboards and a fluttering of pages, we are thrilled to announce the theme for the 2020 UCL Publishers’ Prize: Libraries. We are now open for submissions of short stories of up to 3000 words and poetry between three and forty lines as well as flash fiction. Please send us your takes on this most magical of places accompanied by a short biographical note to DIS.DIS-Pub-Prize@ucl.ac.uk by the 27th of January 2020. [edit: email under construction please email marketingpublishersprize@gmail.com]

You might be wondering what we mean when we say the theme is libraries. We don’t want to narrow it down for you, but instead, we want to encourage you to ask yourself what you associate with the term, be it a place, a feeling, a person, an object, or anything else you may think of. While ‘Libraries’ is the main theme for this year’s anthology, our team will be accepting submissions that revolve around book spaces as well.

We cannot wait to read your submissions and would like to assuage some of the worries you might have. There is no need to be a professional writer, a student of UCL (or a 2019 graduate) is all the requirement there is.

The process is simple: we will select a longlist from the submissions which will then be edited and published in the Publishers’ Prize Anthology. Out of these, we will decide on a shortlist, which we will pass on to our external panel of judges made up of publishing professionals, who will then pick the winning story or poem. There shall be prizes and glory to be won, so get out your writing quills and start penning those entries!

✒︎The Pub Prize Team