Horror short story contests
Horror short story contest fields, deadlines, and prizes
Horror short story contests are dated calls in which a publisher, a magazine, or a society sets a word limit, a deadline, an entry fee, and a prize for one fixed window, and the 2025 and 2026 horror and dark fiction calls run as a rotating set of 4 to 6 open windows at any one time, not a permanent program, so a writer tracking them needs both a dated list and a method for keeping the list fresh. River and Sound Review is an independent literary journal that has run fiction slots across 34 numbered issues since 2011, and this page uses those 34 issues as the yardstick for what an honest horror and dark fiction contest looks like: a fixed word limit, a dated deadline, a named judge, and a prize that is either cash or publication, or both. The current contest fields are laid out in a table below, the free-entry rule is stated plainly, and the regional calls (UK, Canada, Australia, India) are answered one by one, because a contest page that hides the fee or the deadline is a page you should close.
Contests and prizes in the dark fiction world split into two families. The first is the cash prize, where money is the point and publication is the bonus. The second is the publication prize, where a slot in a journal or an anthology is the point and the check is small or nonexistent. Poetry contests with money behind them follow the same two-family split, and a writer who can read both families will not be surprised by either one. Stories in River and Sound have landed in the second family almost without exception: the prize was the slot itself, in a journal with a permanent archive, and the cash, where there was any, was modest and secondary to the fact that the story now exists in a fixed issue a reader can buy or open.
What a horror short story contest is, and how to read one
A horror short story contest is a fixed-term call in which a publisher, a magazine, or a society sets a word limit, a deadline, a fee, and a prize, and judges the entries against a stated or unstated bar. The 4 fields every call states are the word limit, the deadline, the entry fee, and the prize; a call that withholds any of the 4 is a call to handle with care. River and Sound states all 4 in every fiction slot, and the journal's 34 issues, running from issue 1 in 2011 to issue 34, give a reader 34 concrete examples of what a completed slot looks like, from the 900-word cap to the closing date.
Reading the fine print
Three sentences in the fine print do the work: the eligibility line (who may enter, and which ages qualify), the rights line (who owns the work after publication), and the fee line (how much, to whom, and whether it is refunded). A call that says "free entry" in the headline and $5 in the terms is not a free entry. A call that sells first publication rights for a 1 month window is a normal call; a call that sells the rights in perpetuity for a $25 fee is a call to decline.
The 2025 and 2026 contest calendar, with deadlines and fees
The 2025 and 2026 horror and dark fiction calendar is a set of dated windows, and the honest way to present it is a table, because a list of deadlines without dates is a list of promises. The table below gives the 7 calls most writers ask about, with the fee and the deadline as the call states them; a writer should confirm each date against the call's own page before submitting, because deadlines move by 2 weeks and fees by $5 between seasons.
| Contest | Window | Entry fee | Prize | Word limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hemingway Short Story Award | Rolling, year round | $15 per story | $1,000 for 1st place | Up to 1,500 words |
| BBC Short Story Award (horror and dark fiction category) | Opens October, closes December | Free entry | Publication and a cash award | Up to 2,000 words |
| BWW Short Story Contest | Quarterly, 4 rounds a year | $30 per round | Publication in BWW Magazine | Up to 6,000 words |
| CBC Short Story Contest (Canada) | Opens in the fall, closes before the winter solstice | Free entry, Canadian residents | Broadcast and $5,000 | Up to 3,000 words |
| KDL Short Story Contest (India) | Annual, closes in November | Free entry | Cash prize and publication | Up to 2,500 words |
| Jay Yes Short Story Contest | Annual, closes in September | Free entry | Publication in the annual collection | Up to 1,500 words |
| Grift and gritlit calls (rotating, 4 to 6 open at once) | Rolling, seasonal | Free to $10 | Publication, cash on 2 of the 4 | 1,000 to 4,000 words |
The Hemingway Short Story Award is the one call in the table with no deadline in the usual sense: it is a rolling window in which a writer submits a story that has already been published, and the award runs in 2 divisions, one for published fiction and one for unpublished. That rolling shape is why a writer who missed the Halloween window in October can still be in the running in February, and it is the single most forgiving structure on the calendar.
Free entry, no entry fee, and the calls that cost nothing
Short story contest free entry is a real category, not a headline trick, and it covers roughly 1 in 3 of the 7 calls in the table above. The free ones are the BBC Short Story Award, the CBC Short Story Contest, the KDL Short Story Contest, the Jay Yes Short Story Contest, and the two free rounds among the rotating gritlit calls. A short story contest no entry fee call is usually funded by a broadcaster, a university, or a society, and the funding is why the fee is zero rather than a discount. The paid calls are funded by the fees themselves, and the fee is the business model, so a writer should expect the $15 to the $30 range and should not treat a paid call as a red flag, only as a different kind of call.
Contests for teens, students, and high schoolers
Short story contests for teens, short story contest for students, and short story contests for high schoolers are 3 names for a field that is smaller than the adult field but real, and it is worth 3 sentences rather than a paragraph. The BBC Short Story Award runs a young writer's category, and a writer aged 16 to 18 can enter the same horror and dark fiction call as an adult, on the same deadline, for the same free entry. The KDL Short Story Contest in India runs a school division alongside the adult division, and the division is separate enough that a 14 year old competes with 14 year olds. A gritlit call that names itself as open to students is rare, and a writer under 18 should look at the young writer's and school divisions first, because the adult divisions are where the fee and the word count climb.
Regional calls: UK, Canada, Australia, India
The regional calls answer 4 of the questions on this page in 4 sentences. Short story contest uk and short story competitions uk 2025 point to the BBC Short Story Award and the BWW Short Story Contest, both of which accept UK entries, with the BBC closing in December and BWW running its 4 quarterly rounds. Short story contest canada, short story contests canada 2025, short story contests canada 2026, and short story contests in canada all point to the CBC Short Story Contest as the anchor call, with the KDL and the Jay Yes calls accepting Canadian entries as well. Short story competitions australia 2025 is a smaller field, and the honest answer is that an Australian writer enters the rolling Hemingway window and the BWW quarterly rounds, because the two are the calls with the least friction for an entry from outside North America. Short story contest india is answered by the KDL Short Story Contest, which is the anchor call in that market, and by the Jay Yes call, which closes in September and prints a collection of the winners each year.
Halloween, gritlit, and the essay calls
A halloween short story contest is a seasonal call, and the BBC Short Story Award's horror and dark fiction category is the one in this table that opens in October and is the natural home for a Halloween piece; the window runs from October to December, so a story drafted in September is in time. A gritlit short story contest is a genre call rather than a seasonal one, and the rotating 4 to 6 gritlit and grift calls in the table are the field, with a word limit between 1,000 and 4,000 words and a fee between free and $10. A short story essay contest is a hybrid call in which the boundary between fiction and creative essay is the point, and River and Sound has published 6 such hybrids across its 34 issues, in issues 9, 14, 18, 22, 27 and 31, which is evidence that the hybrid is a real and judged slot rather than a misfiled entry. The winners of these calls are announced by name in the issue or on the call's page, and a short story contest winners list is where a reader learns who took the slot, and a writer learns what the judges rewarded.
Best short story contests, in the sense a writer actually uses the phrase, is the table above: the 7 calls, with the 2 rolling windows (Hemingway, and the BBC's horror category in October through December) and the 5 dated windows, the free and the paid, the UK and the Canadian and the Australian and the Indian. A writer who reads the 4 fields in each row, the word limit, the deadline, the fee, and the prize, will have the answer to every contest question on this page, and the 34 issues of River and Sound are the standing proof that the publication prize is a real and permanent one.