SINE THETA MAGAZINE’S 6TH ANNUAL WRITING CONTEST
Submissions period: 2 June to 10 July 2024
Sine Theta are pleased to announce the sixth iteration of our annual writing contest! We are delighted to announce Kim Fu (author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century) as this year’s Fiction judge and Mary Jean Chan (author of Bright Fear) as this year’s Poetry judge.
Submit by 10 July 2024 for a chance to be published in our upcoming issue, sinθ #32. This year, we’re able to offer the winner in each category a $150 USD cash prize. Thank you to our Patreon subscribers for the support that makes this award possible.
We’re accepting entries for both fiction (prose) and poetry. We invite you to reflect on the following three prompts as inspiration for your pieces. You may reflect on the prompts separately or as a collective, drawing themes and ideas that resonate with you. Entries must engage with the prompt(s), and can do so either directly or indirectly.
There is no submission fee.
You may only submit one entry per category, so send us your best work!
“Image: Still from 过春天 / The Crossing (2018) dir. Bai Xue. Through a window, a girl in school uniform sits at a restaurant table, eating. She is the only figure visible inside the restaurant. Visible in the window reflection there is a man standing on the street, smoking and looking into the distance. Behind this man, also in the reflection, there is a red car indicating street traffic.
“I relaxed my grip on the seed momentarily and then squeezed it more tightly than ever in the firm grip of my winding coils. The yellow flesh sweated, effused scent. In my tight grip, something inside the seed seemed to stir. I felt a slight, momentary vibration. Though I held the heart of the fruit, the fruit held me. Its strange acids worked at my flesh in a way that discomfited me. I found a small hole in the seed. I scaled further down and crawled inside. I became the seed and the seed became me. Whatever grows from it will be mine.”
——Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (2002)
Email sinethetamag@gmail.com with “Writing Competition - NAME - CATEGORY” as the subject line. Attach your submission as a PDF or Word document, with the document title as “CATEGORY - WORK TITLE”. Do not include your name on the document, as entries will be judged anonymously. If you are entering a poetry and a fiction piece, please submit each piece separately via email.
Please include the following completed form with your submission in the body of your email:
Kim Fu is the author of two novels, a collection of poetry, and most recently, the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, winner of the Washington State Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, as well as a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ignyte Awards, and the Shirley Jackson Awards. Stories in this collection have been selected for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and Best of the Net, featured on Levar Burton Reads and Selected Shorts, and optioned for television and film. Fu lives in Seattle, Washington.
Mary Jean Chan is the author of the poetry collection Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019) and Faber USA (2020). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Chan's second book, Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), is a Guardian Best Poetry Book of 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Writers' Prize (formerly the Folio Prize). Bright Fear is currently shortlisted for the 2024 Dylan Thomas Prize. Chan co-edited the anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan and recently served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan is the 2023-24 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a judge for the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize.
Poetry: "Motherlore, in the flock of cries" by Zen Ren
Short fiction: "The Last Daughter" by Trini Feng
Judged by Lan Samantha Chang and Ching-In Chen
Poetry: "Autumn, as a Color" by Lily Zhou
Short fiction: "Pleasantries" by Daisuke Shen
Judged by Yanyi and Jamie Marina Lau
Poetry: "Untitled, 2020 (after Ren Hang)" by Alice Liang
Short fiction: "The Wedding Dress" by Celeste Chen
Judged by Chen Chen and Rebecca F. Kuang
Poetry: “etymology of ‘moon’” by Stella Li
Short fiction: “The Girlfriend Place” by Ariel Chu
Judged by Sally Wen Mao and K-Ming Chang.
Poetry: “Self-Portrait as the Dead Fish in Some Guy’s Tinder Profile Picture” by Erin Jin Mei O’Malley
Short fiction: “Auntland” by K-Ming Chang
Judged by Sharlene Teo and Nancy Huang.