Introducing the Speculate Prize
Introducing the Speculate Prize
In 2021 RMIT will launch the Speculate Prize in partnership with Giramondo Publishing. Speculate is a new trans-Tasman award for an unpublished speculative fiction manuscript, sponsored by Whispir and supported by the Speculate Literary Festival.
Speculative fiction is the perfect form to write the future, right the past and rewrite the present.
This biennial prize is aimed at writers who explore the expansive possibilities of literature: those who imagine other worlds—other realities—that may even exist within our own. We wish to uncover and support writers who embrace new literary modes and extend the possibilities of the novel and short story form.
The 2021 Speculate Prize will be judged by Rose Michael (RMIT), Astrid Edwards (MWF) and Nick Tapper (Giramondo) and critic Declan Fry.
Submissions open 2 August, close midnight 1 September, 2021. Winner announced in November.
The winner will receive:
$5000 prize money, inclusive of travel costs
a mentorship from Giramondo Publishing
a week-long residency at RMIT’s McCraith House on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria
One highly commended author will receive:
a twelve-month book subscription (valued at $250) from Giramondo Publishing
a feedback session with a Giramondo editor
CRITERIA
The Speculate Prize is open to residents of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
The manuscript must not be published (in any country or form, including digital and self-published), or under consideration with publishers.
The manuscript must be complete, no less than 30,000 words and no more than 100,000 words.
The manuscript must be in Word or PDF, a serif font, 12 pt, with 1.5 line spacing. It should have page numbers.
The manuscript should include a cover sheet with title, author name, and a brief one-paragraph summary. (If you wish, please specify whether you identify with the community represented in your piece. As per Overland’s recent editorial statement on blind judging, this response will only be provided to judges if they ask for it.)
The author’s name should not appear anywhere else on the manuscript.
(For the purposes of the Speculate Prize ‘speculative fiction’ is recognised as not only science fiction and fantasy, weird fiction, cosmic horror, alternate history, and utopias and dystopias etc., but any non-realist writing testing the limits of literature.)
Writing the Future 6.30pm Wed 9 Mar
A Speculate Prize in-conversation, presented at The Capitol in partnership with RMIT Writing & Publishing
In this intimate Salon event speculative fiction writers Kate Mildenhall (Skylarking, The Mother Fault) and Eugen Bacon (Road to Woop Woop , Danged Black Thing) explore the expansive possibilities of literature in the context of our rapidly changing world with RMIT’s Rose Michael (The Asking Game, The Art of Navigation). Together, they will discuss how non-realist writing has the potential to imagine other worlds and other realities and to better understand our own.
