Submissions for The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest are accepted electronically every year from January 1 through January 31.
The Kenyon Review publishes the winning story in print, and the author is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.
- Submit via Submittable starting January 1.
- Writers must not have published a book of fiction at the time of submission. (The Kenyon Review defines a “published book of fiction” as a novel, novella, short story collection, or other fiction collection written by you and published by someone other than you in print, on the web, or in ebook format.)
- Submissions must be no more than 3,000 words in length.
- Please submit no more than once per year.
- Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest.
- Please do not submit work that has been previously published.
- Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript.
- The Submittable portal will remain active between January 1 and 31, 2024.
- The entry fee for the Short Nonfiction Contest is $24, collected at the time of submission. All entrants are invited to claim a complimentary half-year Print plus Digital subscription to The Kenyon Review (for domestic addresses) or a half-year Digital-only subscription (for international addresses) through February 15, 2024. Your new half-year subscription to The Kenyon Review will include the Spring 2024 and Summer 2024 issues. Current subscribers will receive a two-issue extension on their current subscription.
The final judge of this year’s contest is Idra Novey (Photo credit: Jesse Ditmar). Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her most recent novel, Take What You Need, was selected as one of The New Yorker‘s Best Books of 2023 so far. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and her second novel, Those Who Knew, was a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages, and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story “The Glacier,” published in The Yale Review. Her new book of poems, Soon and Wholly, will be published in 2024. She teaches fiction at Princeton University.