The Vocal+ Fiction Awards
Enter our biggest Challenge yet: 25 winners, $125,000 in prizes, and Vocal's first ever book of short stories by our creators.
Prizes
- Total prizes:
- $125,000
- 25 winners receive:
- $5,000
25 Grand Prize winners will each receive $5,000, and be published in Vocal's first ever book, a collection of short stories by our creators.
1,000 runners up will be selected, and will each receive a free year of Vocal+ membership.
Status
CompletedTimeline
Submissions opened
Oct 13, 2021
Submissions closed
Dec 30, 2021 4:59 AM CUT
Results
Feb 25, 2022
Prizes
- Total prizes:
- $125,000
- 25 winners receive:
- $5,000
25 Grand Prize winners will each receive $5,000, and be published in Vocal's first ever book, a collection of short stories by our creators.
1,000 runners up will be selected, and will each receive a free year of Vocal+ membership.
Status
CompletedTimeline
Submissions opened
Oct 13, 2021
Submissions closed
Dec 30, 2021 4:59 AM CUT
Results
Feb 25, 2022
About this challenge
*Note from the Vocal Team: The Judges have spoken, and 1,025 Vocal+ Creators have been selected as finalists for The Vocal+ Fiction Awards! See if your story made the list here!
We've now had over 100,000 stories entered into Vocal Challenges, and we have given away over $500,000 directly to our creators through Challenges. And we're celebrating these milestones with our biggest Challenge to date.
For this Challenge, there is no prompt, genre or theme you must stick to, or requirement your story must meet. Submit your best piece of short fiction, between 600 and 4,000 words, in any style, genre, or topic of your choosing.
25 grand prize winners will be selected to receive $5,000 each, and have their stories published in Vocal's first ever book—a collection of short stories by Vocal creators, available for purchase, estimated for release in the spring of 2022. 1,000 runners up will be selected to receive a free year of Vocal+.
Learn more about this Challenge here.
*Note that due to high volume, submissions that have been entered into the Vocal+ Fiction Awards will not necessarily be moderated within the standard 24 hour timeframe. Please anticipate a 3-4 day wait period for all stories entered into the Challenge to be moderated. Thank you for your patience.
How to enter
Your story must be between 600 and 4,000 words and adhere to our Community Guidelines. Stories published on Vocal and entered into the contest up until December 29, 2021, at 11:59 PM EST will be entered for consideration. Official Rules for the Challenge can be found here.
The Vocal+ Fiction Awards are exclusive to Vocal+ members. To learn more and upgrade to Vocal+ visit https://vocal.media/vocal-plus.
To be eligible to win the grand prize, second place, or third place prizes, you must be over the age of 13 and residing in a country where Stripe is available at the time of entry. A complete list of countries where Stripe is available can be found here—winners will need to have a Stripe account created and connected in order to receive the prizes. For this reason, entrants located outside of any of these countries will not be eligible to win.
Open challenges
Challenges you can enter now for a chance to win.
Challenge resources
Love Unraveled Challenge Winners
Sometimes the simplest challenges are the deepest and most revealing. For this challenge we asked you to “unravel the mysteries, joys, and challenges of love through the power of personal storytelling” — we all love, we all feel we know what it means to love. Yet this challenge offered a reminder of the infinite shapes of human connection, and what power love has over us, even in the face of struggle and pain.
Vocal Curation TeamPublished 4 days ago in ResourcesInverse Challenge Winners
Misplaced keys, biodegradable pots, rainbow jellycats… such “ordinary” objects, images, you might say — but they are what make Teresa Renton’s Lost Things Wait for You to Find Them but Sometimes They Don't inverse poem stand out as our winner. We are drawn into the particular world of this poem by specific visions like that. In this latest challenge, we asked you for a poem that could be read from the top or the bottom, and which takes on a different meaning depending which way you read. Teresa’s poem made me think a little bit of Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle, One Art, in its conflicted engagement with loss and abandonment. A terrific achievement.
Vocal Curation TeamPublished 11 days ago in ResourcesSnow Micro Challenge Winners
We think of snow as cleansing, purifying — but thinking outside the box is never a bad idea. For our Snow Micro challenge, our Grand Prize winner Dane BH conjures up light flurries in her winning entry, Our Tribe. Dirty gray city snow mounds in piles before melting away, an effective but never forced metaphor for a friendship that has thinned and frayed beyond survival. This is a brief masterclass in effective storytelling.
Vocal Curation TeamPublished 18 days ago in Resources