Our summer reading period is open now, and will run until Friday, 26th September, 2025.

This year, we’ll be running two separate call for submissions:

• Our General Submission Call is our standard call for stories in any of the themes and styles we features in our anthologies.
• We’ll be announcing a very special second call for submissions later this July. Keep an eye on this page – or sign up for our newsletter in the box below – to find out more about this.

The deadline for both calls is midnight on Friday, 26th September, so please make sure to send in your work before then.

As ever, be sure to read our submission guidelines before sending in your work – and why not read one of our anthologies to get up to speed before submitting? Our latest volumes are the general fiction collection Inside Voices, and the supernatural collection New Ghost Stories IV.

More news

Also this summer, we’ll be preparing the next Fiction Desk anthology, and making a special announcement about some new projects.

The deadline for our spring short story submissions period is midnight (UK time) on Friday, 30th May.

Until then, we’re running two separate submission calls. You can find out more about them following the links below:

• As ever, we have a general submissions call for short stories in all of the styles and genres we usually feature in our anthologies.
• This spring, our special themed call is for stories about games.

Although we don’t do a lot of social media here at The Fiction Desk, we are now on Bluesky. You can follow us at @thefictiondesk.com for news of upcoming projects, new books, and submissions opportunities.

One of the fun things about being a small publisher is that we can experiment with ways to find a home for the kinds of stories that are traditionally hard to publish.

Following some feedback from authors regarding the limited market for longer short stories, we’re extending our maximum word count to 15,000 words. This is a great length for fiction, giving plenty of space to develop ideas, without being as long as a full novella.

As ever, you can find full submissions information, including the new word count limits, on our submissions guidelines page.

Today we’re launching our new themed submission call, for short stories about games of all kinds.

The deadline for this one is Friday, 30th May, and you can find out more about it in the submissions section of our website.

Our spring submissions period is open now, and will run until Friday, 30th May 2025.

The submission form is available today if you’d like to send in work for our general fiction call (you can find out more about that here), but we’ll also be announcing a special themed call at the start of March. Both calls will run until the deadline.

In the meantime, we’ll be busy reading your submissions and preparing our next anthology. There will also be some exciting news to share with you in the coming months, so keep an eye out for that.

As ever, be sure to read our submission guidelines before sending in your work – and why not read one of our anthologies to get up to speed before submitting? Our latest volume is called Inside Voices, and it’s out now.

It’s always a pleasure to announce a new winner of the Fiction Desk Writer’s Award.

If you’re not already familiar with the Writer’s Award, it’s presented to the author of the best story in each of our anthologies, as voted for by the contributors themselves. We’re always fortunate with the quality of the stories we publish, and it’s a close competition.

The Award for Inside Voices was particularly tough, with no fewer than two previous winners among the contributors: both Alastair Chisholm (for his story ‘Exhalation’ in Somewhere This Way), and Jo Gatford (who won it for ‘Yellow Rock’ in New Ghost Stories IV). All of the other contributors to Inside Voices were new to us, so it was always going to be an interesting contest.

The stories themselves represent the Fiction Desk’s usual range of literary and supernatural fiction, and were as strong as ever. Here’s a quick recap:

It opens with Jo’s story ‘Inside Voices’, which gave the anthology both its title and a strong start with its story of a couple taking an emotionally tense road trip across the USA. Next up is Alastair’s story ‘Mayflies’, which takes a haunting look at the way people and lives can form into patterns, repeating themselves over and over.

The third story, David Malvina’s ‘Book Burning’, starts off on what feels like familiar territory, before taking things in an unexpected (and unexpectedly moving) direction, while Eva Carson’s ‘The Business at Tradeston’ is a wonderful piece of science-fiction in a classic British style. That’s followed by Lauren O’Donoghue’s ‘Black Hill’, with its superb psychology and characterisation.

The anthology concludes with Ian Critchley’s ‘Ghost Walks’, a story of doubles and relationships and lives gone astray, and finally Tina Morganella’s evocative tale of lockdown, ‘The Loop’.

And the winner?

It’s Tina Morganella, for ‘The Loop’.

Congratulations to Tina, and thank you to all of the contributors, both for their superb stories, and for voting in the award.

And if you’ve not yet read Inside Voices yourself, you can grab your copy here.

We’re delighted to see that Ben Tufnell’s story ‘An Invocation’, which we featured in our anthology New Ghost Stories IV, has been chosen for inclusion in this year’s Best British Short Stories anthology.

If you’re not familiar with the Best British Short Stories series, it’s an annual collection of new short fiction from both established and new writers, edited by Nicholas Royle for Salt Publishing. This is the second time they’ve picked up one of our stories, and it’s always a pleasure to see our writers have an opportunity to meet more readers through the series.

Ben’s story is still available in New Ghost Stories IV (get your copy here!), and you can find out more about Best British Short Stories 2024 over on Salt’s website.

As the nights get longer and suspiciously colder, here’s a quick guide to what’s happening this winter here at The Fiction Desk.

First, our new anthology is out now, and is well worth a read, particularly if you’ve not picked up one of our anthologies for a while. It’s called Inside Voices, and you can find out more about it here.

We’re also running two submission calls this winter:

• Our general submission call is for stories on any theme, in any of the genres we usually feature in our pages. This is open now, with a deadline of 31 January 2025.
• Our annual ghost story submission call, for all kinds of supernatural fiction. This call is also open now, and runs until the end of January.

As always, don’t forget to read our submission guidelines, and please read at least one of our anthologies before sending in your work – why not start with Inside Voices?

Always one of the most popular (and entertaining) parts of our editorial year, our annual ghost story submission call is now open.

Supernatural fiction has always been an important part of our output here at the Fiction Desk – just as it’s always been an important part of the history of the short story as a form. This annual call is about celebrating that, as well as finding a home for some some superb new ghost stories.

You can read more about the call here. (And if you’re in need of inspiration, you’ll find our latest supernatural fiction in New Ghost Stories IV, which you can get right here.)

Finally, if you’re not into ghost stories, don’t worry: our general call is open now too. Find out more about the general submission call here.