Window: Opens Friday, 23 October 2026 (midday AEST) and closes Friday, 27 November 2026 (6:00 PM AEST)
Categories & Limits: Short fiction (up to 5,000 words), non-fiction essays and memoir (up to 5,000 words), and poetry (up to three poems).
Focus & Terms: Broad overarching theme of “Storytelling”. Contributions are paid standard industry contributor rates upon publication. Submissions are processed via Submittable. (Source)
Form & Scope: Original fiction that discards traditional brevity limits to encourage longer, thematically complex narrative exploration.
Terms: Guest judged by 2025 winner Oscar Revelins alongside the editorial team; winner receives publication in Varnish. Submissions handled via email. (Source)
Scope: Literary agency open window accepting unsolicited manuscript proposals and query letters across literary fiction, commercial fiction, narrative non-fiction, and YA without requiring agent referral. (Source)
Closing Date: Wednesday, 18 November 2026 (5:00 PM ACDT)
Form & Scope: Flash fiction and poetry up to 500 words on the theme “Stronger Together”, exploring community, resilience, and intergenerational connections. Open to SA writers and those with ties to the region.
Categories & Awards: Flash Fiction (18+), Poetry (18+), and Youth (12–17). AU$100 prize per category winner. (Source)
Closing Date: Sunday, 8 November 2026 (11:59 PM AEST)
Medium & Focus: Watercolour explorations of landscape (broadly defined to include land, environment, seascape, rural, or urban habitat; representational or abstracted).
Prizes & Exhibition: AU$20,000 non-acquisitive major prize. Shortlisted works shown at QCAD Galleries, South Bank, Brisbane from 10 December 2026. Open to Australian artists 18+. (Source)
Closing Date: Sunday, 15 November 2026 (Midnight AEDT)
Mediums & Dimensions: All 2D and 3D media, including photography, printmaking, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Artwork must not exceed 35 × 35 × 35 cm (inclusive of framing).
Prizes & Exhibition: Over AU$15,000 in prizes (including two AU$2,000 solo exhibition packages). All eligible entered works will be exhibited in the gallery from 9–23 January 2027. Full entry guidelines are on the BSG Information Page. (Source)
Mediums & Dimensions: Open to Australian artists 18+ working in drawing, photography, painting, printmaking, mixed media, or short silent moving-image. Artworks must be created in 2026 and measure no larger than A5 (14.8 × 21 cm, max depth 14.8 cm). Theme: “Emergence”.
Prizes & Terms: AU$1,000 non-acquisitive major prize, eleven AU$100 non-acquisitive awards, and inclusion in the 2027 calendar. Exhibition runs 3–23 December 2026. (Source)
Here is a digest of active publishing opportunities, prizes, and open calls across creative writing and visual arts for the week of Saturday, 10 October 2026:
Category: Poetry (single poem, maximum 60 lines, open theme)
Eligibility & Rules: Open to all poets writing in English worldwide. Poems must be original and previously unpublished.
Prizes & Entry Fee: AU$6,000 first prize; AU$1,000 for each of four shortlisted poets (AU$10,000 total pool). All shortlisted poems are published in *ABR*. Entry fee is AU$30 (AU$20 for current ABR subscribers). Details and listing also available via Writing NSW’s October Calendar.
Category: Short fiction or creative non-fiction/memoir
Eligibility & Rules: Open to writers aged 18+ internationally. Submissions must explore themes of hope, courage, or resilience; maximum 5,000 words (no minimum); double-spaced. Submit via The Hope Prize Submission Portal.
Prizes: AU$13,000 total prize pool (AU$10,000 first prize supported by Simon & Schuster Australia and Readings Books; AU$2,000 second; AU$1,000 third). Winning and highly commended stories will be published in a Simon & Schuster anthology.
Eligibility & Rules: Stories between 2,000 and 5,000 words incorporating classic elements of suspense, mystery, investigation, or crime. Presented in association with the Australian Crime Writers Association.
Prizes & Entry Fee: $1,000 first prize; entry fee $35.
Eligibility & Rules: Open to unagented writers who are residents of Australia and New Zealand. Requires a one-page synopsis, author bio, and sample chapters (first 50 pages) submitted via their online agency portal.
Category: Short fiction (up to 3,000 words), poetry (up to 3 poems per submission), and creative essays
Guidelines & Payment: Actively seeking progressive and experimental writing. Accepted print and online contributors receive standard industry rates (AUD $150–$500+ depending on genre and format).
Category: Poetry (up to 3 poems) and short prose (fiction/creative non-fiction up to 2,500 words)
Theme: “Fever” — exploring heat, delirium, obsession, intensity, and illness. Fee-free general submission route.
Visual Art & Photography Calls
Here is your weekly digest of active publishing opportunities, literary prizes, and visual art open calls, cross-referenced against your tracked bookmarks and regional directory listings:
Form & Scope: Prose short stories between 2,000 and 5,000 words exploring the experience of people facing hardship, poverty, or marginalisation with resilience, dignity, and hope. Open globally (18+).
Prizes & Terms: AU$13,000 prize pool (AU$10,000 first prize; AU$2,000 second prize; AU$1,000 third prize).
Closing Date: Friday, 12 December 2026 (6:00 PM AEST)
Form & Scope: Full unpublished fiction or narrative non-fiction manuscripts up to 80,000 words.
Prizes & Terms: Traditional trade publishing contract with Hawkeye Books plus an author coaching and structural/line editing package valued at AU$3,500. Two categories awarded: Open and Own Voices.
Entry Fee: AU$45 standard / AU$99 with comprehensive written assessment. (Source)
Submission Window: Opens Friday, 23 October 2026 (Midday AEST) — Closes Friday, 27 November 2026 (6:00 PM AEST)
Categories: Poetry (up to 3 poems), Short Fiction (up to 5,000 words), and Non-Fiction/Essays (up to 5,000 words).
Theme & Guidelines: Broad overarching theme of “Storytelling”. All accepted contributions are paid upon publication. Portals open on Submittable. (Source)
Scope: Literary agency accepting unsolicited queries and manuscript proposals across literary fiction, commercial fiction, narrative non-fiction, and young adult writing without prior referral. (Source)
Scope: Single-sentence poetry (One Sentence Poems) and short fiction/poetry/creative non-fiction with rapid turnaround (Eunoia Review). Both accessible directly via your Raindrop writing collection.
Closing Date: Sunday, 11 October 2026 (Late entries accepted through 18 October 2026)
Mediums: Photography, digital media, drawing, painting, mixed media, sculpture, and video art.
Prizes & Terms: £10,000 Main Art Prize, £1,000 Emerging Art Prize, group exhibition in York, and publication in the Future Now: 100 Contemporary Artists anthology.
Entry Fee: Registration via site checkout. (Source)
Mediums & Specs: Open to all 2D and 3D media (including photography, drawings, printmaking, painting, and small sculpture). Artwork must not exceed 35 × 35 × 35 cm.
Prizes & Exhibition: Over AU$15,000 in prizes, including two AU$2,000 solo exhibition packages and category awards. All eligible entries will be hung in the exhibition from 9–23 January 2027.
Late in 2019, the Australian prime minister (marketing guru and shitty-pants Scott Morrison, ‘Sco-Mo’ to you) and his theatre assistants removed the federal administration’s arts appendix. One moment the word ‘Arts’ appeared somewhere in the names of government departments, and the next it had gone. Snip! And he chucked it in the bin.
Well, not exactly… ‘Arts’ was removed from a department’s name. To compensate, the yarts (as they are called in Australia) got an office. The Office of the Arts: <https://www.arts.gov.au/>. Never have the arts and government been so closely aligned than in this uniform resource locator.
There were articles in newspapers, outrage on the arts websites, and a long rash of angry emojis at the end of comments on Facebook.
The conservative government in Australia, returned at the May 2019 election by a slender margin, had decided a feature of the victory after-party would be to show the country’s angry, artistic child the door. “Your mother and I are tired of you! Always with your hand out, and never a word of thanks! Get a job!” And then, the ‘clap’ of the fly-screen door and a barely audible ‘clack’ of its tiny snib that seemed to say, “And don’t come back.”
Making art is a patient, lonely business. Making any progress seems to require years of practice and a bit of luck. Guidebooks and internet articles about being an artist, full of advice and clichés, pile up very quickly. Be yourself. Tell your truth. Talent is important, endurance essential. In the age of Instagram, sexy drawings and a bubble-butt are handy, but not essential (or so they say). Governments are not needed, but academic sinecures, supervising doctorates in novel-writing or discussions of queer theory, good if you can get them. When universities are financially sous vide, as they will be emerging from the 2020–forever pandemic, place bets at long odds that the arts will be favored for rehabilitation.
Governments, truth be told, don’t want to help. The governing classes are too busy ‘governing,’ which might as well mean lying, or fudging, or crying crocodile tears, or making a killing on the stock market, or taking a holiday in Hawai’i. To be the governor is to be the winner, the one who calls the shots, to be ‘the decider.’ From their high station in life these decider-governors have a role in narrating our social experience. They have a role we give them in legislating to tell us what is and is not important. (Have you noticed how very often our prime minister tells us what is important, and how very important is the very thing he is now saying?) It’s been a long time since governors of any stripe have shown us how the arts and sciences are important. Business, the economy, the stock market, and jobs are important. Wages growth, arts, and science, women, not so much.
UNFURL, my arts publishing project, was a reaction to artists’ reactions to government biases against the arts. Who needs government moneyanyway? I thought. It turns out, lots of people working in the arts need audiences, and it’s not easy to find and maintain audiences without government assistance. And, even within my narrow range of interests—writing and visual arts—the connections between arts activity and funding are deep. Poetry is not the malnourished tenant of the attic it was in Australia in the mid-1980s. The long lists of books for review and the number of official insignia on web pages are two possible measures of this.
At the same time, long-established literary magazines have had their funding cut. There is money for the arts, so long as it is going to places where the expenditure can be seen to be spent. Government wants the internet to sing “Hey, big spender!” while it cuts funding to Meanjin and others. It may be partly Meanjin’s fault: it has had nearly thirty years to figure out how to get its great store of content online for prospective subscribers to access, while the failure to do so begins to look like obstinacy.
UNFURL asked writers and artists to promote their own work to their own social media contacts while doing the same for other artists and writers: it’s a tool for artists to find new audiences and readers. UNFURL /1 started with a couple of writers I knew, Davide Angelo and James Walton, and a writer whom Angelo recommended, Anne Casey. Susan Wald, also published in the first UNFURL, was a painter whose work I liked and who had an exhibition planned for early 2020. I wanted to establish a process that could lead to unexpected choices. I would try not to make selections. I wanted artists to select or recommend other artists; and I wanted those artists to choose for themselves what they wanted to show with as little mediation as possible, encouraging people to show and to publish work they liked, and that might not have been selected (or grouped together) by an editor or curator.
Government wants the internet to sing “Hey, big spender!” while it cuts funding to Meanjin and others. It may be partly Meanjin’s fault: it has had nearly thirty years to figure out how to get its great store of content online for prospective subscribers to access, while the failure to do so begins to look like obstinacy.
It is more efficient to work on all one’s secret agendas simultaneously, so I should also admit my concern that belle-lettrist aesthetics (including the idea that poetry is language’s semantics incubator) and faux-modernist experimentation have combined to make poetry mostly irrelevant and a branch of marketing. —One only has to look at the writing being selected by the selectors to see that something is wrong with the practice of selection. As much as possible, I think, best to leave artists to make their own choices; and if there are mistakes, then, we’ll know who to blame.
And then, in March 2020 … then was the actual end of the world-as-we-knew-it. Those crazy ‘preppers’ I’ve made fun of started to look like visionaries. “Where the fuck is my bolthole, goddammit!?” and “How big is your bolthole, my friend!?” could have been common questions in some circles. People who could afford it, and had somewhere to go, did leave town. Gen-Xers lost their hospitality jobs, decided that they couldn’t afford their share house rent, and moved back ‘home.’ Artistes no longer had audiences. Artiste-enablers, stagehands, administrators and carpenters, were also out of work. COVID-19 put the arts and sciences back in the news.
The intersectional tragedy of pandemic and conservative political hostility to the lefty arts seemed to many like another opportunity to turn indifference into punishment. It was hard to disagree with pundits who have been cataloging this punishment.
UNFURL, possibly because of all this, has done quite well. By the time UNFURL /5 was released, writers and artists could expect to reach about two thousand readers within a couple of weeks of publication. (Each new UNFURL number provided a little boost to the previous issues, so that all the issues now clock up numbers in the thousands.) Eighty per cent of readers were in Australia, and most of the rest in the USA, Canada, UK and Ireland. The male:female ratio of readers was almost 50:50. The largest age group of readers was 18–35 years. (Though if everyone is ten years younger on the internet, maybe that’s 28–45.)
It’s difficult to read poetry on small-screen devices, so I did not expect UNFURL to be read on phones. The visual arts component of UNFURL is quite effective on phones and tablets, however. It seems likely that readers interested in the writing in UNFURL resorted to their desktops and printers. Sixty to seventy percent of downloads of UNFURL were to mobile and tablet devices.
I learned that women writers (poets) had a ‘stronger’ following among women readers than men had among readers of any kind. It was very apparent, with Gina Mercer, for example, that a very significant number of readers returned more often, subscribed more often, and were women.
I learned that women writers (poets) had a ‘stronger’ following among women readers than men had among readers of any kind. It was very apparent, with Gina Mercer, for example, that a very significant number of readers returned more often, subscribed more often, and were women.
I learned that social media isn’t the be-all and end-all of connecting with an audience. Old-fashioned email also works really well. Some artists and writers had no significant social media presence but used email effectively to communicate with friends and contacts.
I also learned that visual artists were, generally speaking, more enthusiastic and positive about using social media, and even better at basic stuff like answering messages. Visual artists be like Molly Bloom; writers be like Prince of Denmark.
I found that both writers and artists did things in UNFURL other publications might not permit (requiring, as they mostly do, first publication rights). Philip Salom published groupings of new and old poems. Alex Skovron published poems, prose, paintings, and drawings. Steven Warburton published a series of pictures about how one canvas evolved over several years. Robyn Rowland published poems and their translations into Turkish for her readers in Turkey. Ron Miller published a brief survey of his life’s work in space art.
