I just want to keep you in the loop on how things are going with our reading for the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026. We’re halfway there, and Laura, Kerry, Emily and I are flat-out with the reading effort, so it seems likely that we’ll have the longlist out at the end of July or in the first week of August. The shortlist etc. will follow very soon after that. Closer to the time, I’ll let you know the exact announcement dates, so hang in there - you won’t have long to wait!

I also wanted to let you know that our judge, Donal Ryan, has a brilliant new novel launching on 13th August. It’s called Where Are The Kings, and promises to be one of his very best.

Kenny’s Bookshop are currently accepting pre-orders for limited edition signed copies. Just click the image below to connect with Kenny’s and place your order!

Something terrible has happened to Jack but no one seems to want to talk about it.

His uncles can tell him about everything from quantum physics to how to hunt for deer, but they can’t seem to tell him anything about their own sister or why Jack doesn’t feel sad for her in the way he should, or why Grandad tries to shoot Jack’s dad when he gets out of the hospital.

Still, there’s work to be done in the oily wonderland of his uncles’ garage; there’s his beautiful aunt Rose to hypnotise him and his loving grandparents to console him; then there’s JJ, who wants to fight him one day and save him the next.

But with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, it is difficult for Jack to understand the person he is becoming. How can a simple boy learn to become a king?

This is just a short post to say…

Wow, we got there for the second year in a row, and we couldn’t have done it without all the wonderful writers who sent us their work!

All the submissions are in, and it was one wild rush at the end. We’ve already started the reading process, and from today, we’ll double-down on our efforts.

Ideally, we’d like to get the longlist out by the end of July or shortly thereafter. If it takes a bit longer than that, we beg your patience. We won’t be rushed because we understand how much work went into every story, and we want to honour your efforts by carefully considering every submission we’ve received.

As we near the end of the reading process, I’ll send out a post detailing the announcement schedule to keep you all in the loop, so make sure you’re subscribed to us here, and that you follow us on socials.

Well done to everyone who submitted, and the very best of luck to you in the competition!

We’re almost down to wire in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026, and we’re loving the entries we’ve received so far. Keep them coming; we have plenty of room for more!

To inspire you, here is the final part of Donal’s thoughts on the short story, followed by my own!

Submit your stories!

I wrote a story last year that I really liked, and liked the concept of, but felt that it never quite worked. Some vital element was missing, or what was essential was obfuscated by unnecessary detail. Finding myself in need of a 1.5k word story for a submission opportunity, I dug it out of my archive and decided to rework it. In its original form, it was 2.2k words, and it was in the act of stripping it down to the length I needed that the real story began to emerge. I gave it the finishing touches last night, and can honestly say that it is now one of my favourite of my stories, and is perhaps one of my best. I share this to further illuminate one of Donal’s points; if a story isn’t working, step back from it, and give it some space. I have one short story that took me three years to finish. Every story has its time, and some need more time than others to reveal their truth. The worst thing we can do with any piece of writing, as Neil Hegarty recently told me, is to rush it.

Another point that really struck me was the bending of the bar, the moment of change in a story. After it, nothing is the same, and this is of course a classic structure for the short story. There are other forms of story too, though. The one I reworked this week, for example, doesn’t have a bend-the-bar moment, or if it’s there, it is very slight. The story is nuanced and subtle (or so I hope), and much is left to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

This brings me to another point: it’s not good enough that the story makes sense to me, it must also make sense to the reader. I can test this by casting a cold eye over it, as Donal says, and can further test the story by asking peer readers to read it. Their objective opinions might highlight parts of the story that require clarification.

I was reminded this week, as I crafted the new-ish story, that writing short fiction feels very much like chipping away at a slab of marble. The shape is in the stone, and as I tap bits off here and there, as I soften the corners and knock off the edges, it will reveal itself to me. I often don’t know what the shape actually is until I’m well into the process, so must trust my instincts to guide my hand. The closer to the end I get, the more I can mould and refine the shape to balance its elements. Every part must fit, everything in the story must serve the story.

In The Poetics, Aristotle stated that a story:

“… should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it.”

As in a living organism, the parts of a story should be interdependent, and function together in a unified manner to support the whole. There should be nothing superfluous, and each component should play an integral role.

My own definition of story runs as follows:

I’m not saying that this is a perfect definition, nor that it is definitive, but it may provide us with a starting point from which to understand the essence and nature of stories, why they work, and why in some cases they don’t.

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 is open for submissions until June 30th, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.

Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

Submit your stories!

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

Have you read Donal Ryan’s short story collection, A Slanting Of The Sun? If not, I most highly recommend it!

We’re almost into the home stretch of the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026, and the entries are pouring in, but we want to see more, because we know you’ve got a gem or two stored up, just looking for the right home. Imagine getting your work read by a writer of Donal’s calibre and reputation! Six finalists will share that privilege. I was fortunate, in the 2024 All-Ireland Scholarships Creative Writing Award (Public category), to have my work not only read by Donal, Roddy Doyle and Marian Keyes, but to picked as the winner. I can assure you, there’s no better feeling, so send those stories our way!

Meanwhile, read more of Donal’s thoughts on the short story below, followed by my own humble musings!

Submit your stories!

When I imagine Donal sitting down to work on a story, I see him gazing out the window to a beautiful, sunlit garden, his mind swelling with brilliant ideas. He chooses his moment; when the tide is at its highest, he opens his laptop and begins to write. Soon after, a perfectly formed story emerges one hour later, needing no further work. Donal reclines, satisfied with what he has achieved, and resumes his writerly pose. If he was a smoker, this would be the point at which he would light his pipe!

This is a total fantasy, of course, based on my reading of his work, but said work has been through many drafts and edits before it arrived under my eyes, so what I’m seeing is not what he started with, but the final polished version. It’s not fair, then, to compare his final version with my bare-bones beginning. Donal and his peers are as human as the rest of us, and though we may marvel at their work, the truth is that during its initial phase, they have to do what we all do, and get messy with it.

The process Donal describes above is pretty much how I work. I spill the paragraphs, get the story down any old way, and then move things around and cut the heck out of it until it takes on a pleasing shape. I can’t do edits on a blank page, but by setting aside the desire for perfection in the first draft, I can get something on the page that I can further develop. The character’s voice emerges through this process; if it doesn’t, it may indicate that I’m working with the wrong character, or writing in the wrong person, or that I’m just not there yet with the concept of the story. Everything (including writing this article) is an experiment, and if one attempt fails then I will have learned one more way in which the story doesn’t work. It’s an iterative process, and next time - to borrow from Samuel Beckett - I’ll fail better.

A blank page can be intimidating, but really, it’s an invitation to throw words down in any old fashion. Maybe they’ll work, maybe they won’t, but by getting words down, we will have unstuck ourselves and learned something new.

It’s not about finding the rights words at this stage.

If you don’t have any words to throw at the page, try writing your name over and over. I guarantee you, it won’t take more than a minute for other words to come out, to form sentences and then a paragraph. Another good tool is to write a list of words, say ten to fifteen powerful descriptors for your character or the opening scene, or for any part of what might be your new story. The point of these exercises is to break the judgement spell, and trick the mind into making a start.

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 is open for submissions until June 30th, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.

Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

Submit your stories!

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

Today, I share another excerpt from Donal Ryan’s thoughts on the nature of the short story, followed by my own musings on the topic. Donal is our competition judge this year, and we feel very honoured to have him.

That’s enough of a preamble; let’s get into it!

Submit your stories!

We all know what a story is, right? We tell many of them as we go through an average day, stories like:

“You’ll never guess who I met at the supermarket, only Joni who used live in No. 27, and she was with that fella from the butchers on the corner of Main Street, you know the one I mean, he had that nasty dog that hated children, and now Joni is married to him, and I’m there in the supermarket talking to her when…”

Stories are a part of our shared humanity, our cultures, the basis of our social connections. Stories are how we make sense of what can sometimes be a crazy, maddening world. This happened, then this happened, then another thing and another, until - rushing breathlessly to the end - this new thing happened that we didn’t expect, a transformative event that upsets everything. This event may also make sense of what went before, thus leaving us with a contented feeling because we have formed a shape and a pattern of it all, and our brains like nothing better than patterns. In making one, the tale fits neatly into our understanding of the universe.

Some stories may be open-ended and unresolved, of course, leaving an unanswered question, but these can be even more powerful because after the tale has been woven, it still exists within us as an incomplete narrative.

We are left to wonder, and wonderment is, I think, the whole point.

I’ve often said that the first job of a writer is to entertain, and to do this, we must engage our readers. There are a number of ways to do this, such as clever use of language, clarity and precision of prose, creating a mystery or posing questions that engage the reader’s curiosity, thus encouraging them to read on in the hopes of finding a solution. These, and other devices, invite the reader into the story, and make them a part of the narrative world.

At some point in a story, we will want to reach a pivot point, the bending of the iron bar. Something changes in the character and/or the narrative world; something new is learned, a realisation occurs, an event horizon is crossed that can’t be uncrossed. This is the tipping point, the ‘but THEN…’ of the story that leads us to the ‘… until FINALLY…’ of the story, which is the resumption of the narrative continuum, though perhaps in a different form.

So much could be said about short-form fiction, but the main thing today is that, like the man says, writing short stories is hard, while reading them should be entertaining and effortless. In the first instance, what I’m really doing when I write a short story is entertaining myself, because if I’m not enjoying the tale or the process of creating it then the reader probably won’t enjoy reading it. I need to tell myself the story first, and maybe during the editing phase, I will employ some of the devices that can increase reader engagement, if I haven’t already instinctively included them in early drafts.

The most important thing for me as a writer is to create work that makes me laugh and cry and feel some sort of something for my characters and the world I’ve created for them.

If my story can do that for me, I’ll just bet it can do it for you!

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 is open for submissions until June 30th, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.

Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

Submit your stories!

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

I’ve been very fortunate to meet Donal Ryan, our competition judge, a few times, and to have discussed his writing and mine with him. It’s spellbinding, honestly, to hear him talk about the craft of short and long-form fiction. His advice and suggestions are practical and applicable, and he is sincere and generous in his support of up-and-coming writers, including me.

So today, I asked Donal if he could send me his thoughts on the short story, and he was happy to do so. Below is the first extract. I’ll share more of Donal’s thoughts very soon!

Submit your stories!

I’ve written on this topic of struggle a few times in Frazzled Lit. Like Donal, my confidence sometimes vanishes, and I find each new sentence a trudge rather than a joyful exploration. In fact, I’m going through it right now, and wish I had an Anne Marie to tell me to pull my shit together, and keep things in perspective.

We all need cheerleaders from time to time, and that’s our job here at Frazzled Lit, to cheer on every artist we interact with, to celebrate their efforts and their work, and to create a safe and welcoming space for artists of every persuasion, from every part of the world.

So here’s Donal and the whole Frazz Team cheering you on today, regardless of how you may feel!

Get going, get that darned story written, and send it into the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award. We can’t guarantee you will win, but we do promise to treat your work with the love and respect, artist to artist, that it has earned and it is due!

Have you read Donal Ryan’s short story collection, A Slanting Of The Sun? If not, I most highly recommend it!

Here at Frazz HQ, the tea and coffee are brewing, and we are all revved-up for the arrival of the your stories in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026!

Here’s a quick recap of the details:

We are now open, and will remain open until midnight GMT on June 30th.

The competition is open to all writers, from anywhere in the world.

Stories must be between 750 and 2,000 words.

Prizes are as follows:

1^st prize: € 1,000

2^nd prize: € 500

3^rd prize: € 300

Submit your stories!

Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 - Full Rules and Terms & Conditions

Our judge, Donal Ryan, has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021 Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

Submit your stories!

We’re closing in on the opening of the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026, so I’m taking the time to look back at some of the outstanding stories from last year’s competition, and what made them special to us. Last week, we looked at one of last year’s finalists, The Canal by Seamus Scanlon. This week, I’m taking a look at EXPERIENCE SHARING ACTIVATED by Alison Langley, which was highly commended in the competition. Though this story didn’t make the final six, it is no lesser a story than those that did. In fact, it is one of my favourites from last year’s award, and became even more so when Alison provided a wonderful reading to accompany its publication in Issue 3.

In EXPERIENCE SHARING ACTIVATED, we enter a near future where consent is often assumed rather than given, and where technology has become so ubiquitous and invasive (not so very different to today, actually) that the private moments of the characters can be unwittingly revealed, and so make them vulnerable to public attack and ridicule.

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking story, one which is active, energetic and propulsive. Through the protagonist’s journey, it challenges us to think about consent and digital privacy, and how much of ourselves we are willing to give to Big Data. Can we maintain our humanity, and our connection to those around us, while utilising new technologies? Are we in control, or have we ceded it to the devices we use? The narrative poses many such questions, and in this age of rapid advancement in AI and biofeedback technologies, they are entirely worth asking.

We start with a deliciously sensual opening.

There is much to admire in this passage.

I thought I was a goddess this morning straight away gave me an impression of who this narrator is - young, excited, modern, perhaps a little conceited, if not a little naive.

The prose situates me in the story, draws me into the intimacy of this couple’s bed, and sets the groundwork in stylish fashion. I know where I am, and why, and I know who I’m with.

We have a change in the status quo, the introduction of new technology. Good luck, old VRs, and thanks for last night, but we’re upgrading!

It also answers an important question: why is this story happening now?

This is sometimes overlooked in modern short stories, and though the consideration and answering of it is not always essential, it does tend to give a satisfying shape to a story and character arc by setting an identifiable starting point. Taking the reader on a journey from there, showing the change in the protagonist and their circumstances, then bookending the story with an equally clear end point, completes the protagonist’s polar transformation. They are not the same person they were at the beginning, and there is no going back to who they were because something fundamental has changed.

Next, we come to this wonderful line: We may never leave this bed.

It is simple, yet highly effective, and entirely in keeping with the narrator’s voice. It also does a lot of heavy lifting to show me what’s important (at this point in the story) in this couple’s relationship. We are in sensual territory, and if there is a fading to black, it is so well done that it paints fiery pictures in my imagination with the deftest of brush strokes.

Moving on, our narrator takes the walk to work wearing her new VR device, and is guided along the way by Gigi, who offers tantalising digital visions through the VR glasses. An accidental sharing of the display to all the other users of the device in the area causes a panic, and draws all manner of nastiness upon the narrator.

There is a great deal of breathless energy and momentum in this passage, and the writer does a great job of conjuring the environment and the driving emotions of this scene, and all the ones to follow. I sense the narrator’s panic, her pain, her confusion. This once-promising device has turned into a bane, and made her the victim of digital sadism.

I don’t want to give too much of this wonderful story away, so I’ll stop there and let you read or listen to it yourself. I strongly encourage you to do so, to linger with the characters and savour the sensual undertones. The beautiful ending is wonderfully done, and I finished reading the story with a sense of hope for us all.

Jennifer, co-Editor-in-Chief

Dazzle us in June!

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 is open for submissions from June 1st to June 30th, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.

Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

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Submit your stories!

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We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

We’re less than two weeks away from the opening of the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026, so I thought it would be a useful exercise to reflect on some of the outstanding stories from last year’s competition, and what made them special to us. Last week, we looked at last year’s winning story, Limbo Nights by Gary Finnegan. Today, I want to look at one of our finalists, The Canal by Seamus Scanlon.

The Canal comes in at just 838 words, and what the writer manages to do in such a small space is breathtaking. An entire city is conjured, populated with a panoply of rich and flawed characters, and it is all done with prose that is gloriously clear and precise. We knew we were in the hands of a skilled writer when we read this opening:

The writer situates us immediately. We are in Galway, walking wet streets under dak clouds. The voice is clear and uncomplicated, as befits the young tearaway narrator, and it is also precise. The clouds aren’t just black, they are also heavy, and hang low over wet, shiny streets. I was immediately transported into the narrative world, to walk alongside the character, unsure of where he was taking me but assured that I was in the hands of a skilled storyteller. Two new characters are introduced then, Nancy and his mother. And here’s another invitation: we are entering into the quiet intimacy of their friendship, seen through the eyes of the narrator. Is there a hint of jealousy? I think there is, but also I find a sense of detachment coupled with despair. The narrator is illustrating how it is in his life, but we are still not entirely certain of how he feels about it.

Do the math is such a deft line, and acts as an invitation to the reader to enter this character’s world. We are not allowed to be passive here, rather we are asked to actively engage with the story, and to become a part of the narrative.

A few paragraphs on, we come to this:

This swaggering paragraph is executed with great skill, and delightfully deadpan humour. Mary has one hand, and her father was a butcher. The writer could have left it there, and perhaps it would’ve worked if he had, but the next line, I am just saying, is so appropriate to the narrator, and such a wonderful delivery of a dry punchline that it had me laughing out loud.

There is so much more to enjoy in this story, like this list of Nancy’s demands of the narrator.

I hope you will read The Canal, so I don’t want to give away the wonderful ending. I will say that in just over 800 words, Seamus Scanlon created what I rate as one of the very best short stories by any Irish writer, one worthy of the pen of Donal Ryan himself. The setting, the characters, the quiet desperation of the young narrator, are all illustrated with the panache of a skilled author, and with fine touches of humour. It is a marvellous story, and we feel very honoured to feature it in Frazzled Lit!

Jennifer, co-Editor-in-Chief

Dazzle us in June!

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 will open for submissions on June 1st, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.

Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

With the opening of the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 being just around the corner, I’ve been thinking about form and function in stories quite a lot, and what it is that makes a story stand out in our submissions queue. Coupled with this are a number of submission deadlines I’m hoping to meet with some of my own work. I have two new short stories in progress, and am being very much guided by inspiration and my imagination, two curious creatures to work with, that are not always cooperative. Timid in nature, dreadfully skittish, they will sometimes scurry from the undergrowth of one’s consciousness and place a gift in our hands, while at other times, they take flight at the slightest move towards them. They can be encouraged, yes, but never tamed, and nothing draws them out into the open more than my willingness to enter their domain, and get dirty and sloppy and playful with them; scratch your imagination behind the ear, tickle inspiration under its chin, and they will love you for it! The gifts they offer can be abundant; other times they are cheap and plastic. Unpredictable, that’s their way, for they are as capricious as the weather. In any case, I feel we should be grateful to them for what we receive, and what we can create from their offerings.

I think and write about imagination and inspiration quite often, because I am curious about their natures, and how I can utilise them to create something from almost nothing at all. As writers, we habitually harness their energy to inform our work. Some skill is required, of course, but I feel that a great degree of this can be taught, encouraged, and learned. In the absence of anyone to encourage me, I must play this role myself, to which end I have a rotating screensaver text on my laptop. It reads:

Think wild and free!

This snappy slogan came to me while watching a documentary about Muppet-creator Jim Henson, a man whose mind was utterly unfettered. My slogan reminds me to set no limits on my imagination, to be feral and daring in my engagement with it, to roll around in the mud as I plunge into the deeper regions of inner space to envision what is possible with my craft. What I’m drifting towards, in my customary roundabout way, is that there are no limits to what we can do with our fiction, be it short or long form.

We can be bold, adventurous… audacious!

Practically, what does this mean for me, for you, and for us as editors who have the great pleasure of reading your submissions? Does it mean that stories must be experimental and weird, each one breaking new ground and fathoming the unfathomable?

No, it doesn’t mean that.

What I’m talking about here, and what moves us as humans and as editors, is emotive work that deals more with the micro than the macro, the small spaces in ordinary lives, the seemingly dull moments or spans of time that contain within them something extraordinary. Your story might cover an hour, a lifetime, a brief few seconds of a life. It might exist for no longer than a blink or a breath, or deal with entire generations.

Take a look at last year’s winning story, Limbo Nights by Gary Finnegan, for a great example.

Limbo Nights is the story of a bunch of young lads on a pre-college holiday. Through the lens of the protagonist, we grasp the impact of the characters’ life choices, their relational dynamics, the pressure they feel to be awarded a place on the course they desire, and the effects of familial pressure on the choices they make. Thanks to the writer’s skill, we are plunged headfirst into their crazy drunken world, and live through the pivotal moments of their holiday with them. These are ordinary young men at a crucial point in their lives, a point at which the writer allows us to be deeply touched by their humanity, to connect with them for the duration of the story and far beyond its last word, to experience what is extraordinary about them. It’s a simple story in many ways, but is audacious in its rendering. Gary held nothing back, and pulled no punches. In other words, he was courageous in his craft, and skilful in his delivery. Limbo Nights is an excellent story, and a most deserving winner of last year’s competition.

What about the language you use in your story? Must it be fancy and overly lyrical? No, and I urge you not to try to impress us with your linguistic verve. What really captures our attention is clarity and precision in prose, and authenticity of voice. How does your narrator/protagonist speak? If you can convey the tilt and tone of their voice, if you can stay true to it and to them, then we will be awed!

My final bit of advice is to write from your heart about what you love and what you fear. Be playful and energetic, be joyous in the act of creation. Nearly everyone can write a story if they set their mind to it, and every story we receive has the possibility of winning this competition. There are options other than winning, too. Fancy making the longlist or shortlist? How about our list of highly commended stories? Any and all of these possibilities are within your reach, and you can rely on our reputation as generous editors to get something from the competition, even if it’s only a tiered rejection. We want to make room for you, we want you to do well, so get writing, send us the best you have to offer, and we will treat it with the love and respect it deserves!

Can’t wait to see what you send us!

Jennifer, co-Editor-in-Chief

Dazzle us in June!

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 will open for submissions on June 1st, and we feel hugely honoured to have twice Booker-longlisted and multi award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan as this year’s judge.

Donal Ryan has long been one of my literary heroes, and I’ve been most fortunate to meet him, and to have him read some of my work. His short fiction and novels are among the finest works ever produced by an Irish writer. He has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award, and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021, Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 will be judged by Donal Ryan, and will be open for entries from June 1st until June 30th 2026.

Submit your stories!

Rules and Terms & Conditions

The competition

Eligibility

Your submission(s) to the competition

Publication rights

Timing of announcements

Your data privacy

Additional Terms & Conditions

Submit your stories!

All submissions must be made via Duosuma.

You may send any ENQUIRIES to frazzledlitmag@gmail.com

The Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026 opens for submissions on June 1st, and this is your chance to get your work before Donal Ryan, one of Ireland’s greatest writers, a twice Booker-longlisted author of seven bestsellers, winner of multiple national and international awards, and one of the nicest guys one could ever hope to meet!

In the lead-up, I’ll be writing some posts about short stories, and what it takes to get noticed in the queue. Today, I’ll share some thoughts on what you ought not to do in your submission.

Everyone has their own style and ideas for how a story should be written, and we want you to write your story in your own unique way, so what I offer below should be taken as no more than suggestions. None of these items will kill your story (apart from the word count one), and they won’t exclude you from the competition. Nor will they mean you won’t make it to the final, but avoiding these things will certainly help your chances.

Remember, we are your cheerleaders, and we’ll be reading the queue with a view to accepting, rather than rejecting, your story. We want you to succeed, and what this article is really about is putting you in the best posssible position to do so.

At the end of this post, I include links to a couple of earlier craft articles that might be of interest.

And it almost goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway:

We can’t wait to see what you have for us!

Our competition judge this year is Donal Ryan.

Donal has published seven number-one bestsellers, plus a short story collection. He has won many awards for his work, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for many more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award.

He was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016.

In 2021 Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Donal is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Limerick.

1. Leading with rich (and pointless) descriptions

That’s not entirely awful (I just whipped it up, by way of illustration), but it needs to get to the point. What’s this story about? The first line, at least the first paragraph, can encapsulate the entire tale. Get us into the story, situate us, let us know what’s happening. Keep the prose active, especially at the start.

Having said that, a story opening like this can work if the details are relevant to the tale and the character. Does the garden, the sky, the view, really matter at this point? It sets the scene, but it would be better to start with the character rather than the setting.

2. Opening with dialogue

I’m not saying that opening with a passage of dialogue never works, but unless it’s done with great skill, I feel it’s best avoided. I don’t know who the characters are, I don’t care about them, and now the writer has to get me to care when both she and I are on the back foot.

What I’m really saying here is to not overdo it. Opening with a single line line of dialogue can work well, because it raises the reader’s curiosity. Two lines would be stretching it. Three? Well, now I’m lost!

Related to this are stories with too much, or mostly, dialogue. Again, unless it’s done with great skill, it’s a hard act to carry off.

3. Filtering

Using phrases like ‘He saw…’, ‘She thought…’, ‘He heard…’, ‘They noticed…’, all create psychic distance, and put a layer between us and the characters. They should be used sparingly, if at all. Mostly, they’re easy to eliminate.

For example:

‘She thought he would probably text her.’

becomes

‘He would text her. He had to.’

And:

‘She heard a rooster crowing in the distance.

becomes

‘In the distance, a rooster crowed.’

You can get more mileage by removing the filters. And by doing so, you bring the reader closer to the character and the action.

4. Lack of clarity

Subtlety is great, but don’t be so subtle as to confuse us. Ground us in the story. You might think we know what’s going on, but are you entirely sure?

This doesn’t mean you have to spell everything out (in fact, don’t do that), but you need to give us enough hints so that we can work out what’s happening, and to whom.

5. Blowing the ending

End well. A poor ending can ruin the experience of reading the story. We’ve stuck with it all the way, so reward us.

Call back to something at the start of the story, to give it a circular feel.

An open ending is fine.

A flat arc is fine too, but better if it ends with us knowing something new about the character.

6. Hammering home the theme

You might have a clear idea of what the theme is, but don’t tell us. Let us discover or intuit it, or decide for ourselves what the theme is. We might take an entirely different meaning from the story than you intended.

Mostly what we want is a feeling of what the story is about. A sense of it, rather than coming away from it and saying that the story was about grief, or hate, or revenge or whatever.

In most cases we would advise forgetting about theme. Just tell a good tale, and keep us engaged. If there’s meaning there, we will find it.

7. Poor presentation

Spelling errors, little attention to punctuation, sloppy presentation, all show a writer who doesn’t really care for their work. And if they don’t then why should we?

Having said that, we won’t reject a story purely on the basis of poor presentation or sloppy spelling. We understand and accept that not all writers are well-versed in how to present a story, and that spelling errors are unintentional, and may be (for example) due to a writer’s dylexia. So we’ll deal with poor presentation if we have to, and all I’m really trying to do here is to encourage you to read the guidelines and take as much care with your manuscript as you are able.

8. Ignoring the word count rule

Stories under 750 words or over 2,000 words will get an instant rejection. In submissions to issues of Frazzled Lit, we can be more flexible, but this is a competition, and there are rules. It wouldn’t be fair for us to give you a pass on blowing the word count when other writers have worked hard to stick to it.

We are excited to officially announce the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2026, which will open for entries from June 1st until June 30th, and will be judged by international award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan!

The prizes for the competition will be as follows:

1st Prize: € 1,000

2nd Prize: € 500

3rd Prize: € 300

All winning, finalist, shortlisted and highly commended stories will have the option of being published in Issue 5, our special competition issue of Frazzled Lit

There will be an entry fee of € 12 for one story, € 21 for two stories, and € 31 for three stories. These fees are necessary to fund the prizes, and cover costs.

We appreciate that some writers who may wish to enter will not be able to afford the entry fee, so we will offer 20 free entries to low-income writers.

Free entry is for one story only, and is limited to one per successful applicant

Entries to the award must be between 750 and 2,000 words, must be the author’s original work, must not have been previously published or broadcast in any form, and must not have won any other competition. Stories shortlisted in previous competitions will be acceptable, provided they were not published.

Entries must be made via Duosuma, using the link we will provide.

All entries will be blind-read by Jennifer, Laura, Kerry and Emily.

Winners will be selected by Donal Ryan from the six finalists.

Frazzled Lit reserves the right to cancel the competition in the event that we don’t receive enough entries to make up the prize fund and costs. If we cancel the competition, we will refund all entry fees received.

We are happy to read work on any subject, however Frazzled Lit will not accept work that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, ableist, or is hateful towards any person or group. Further, we do not wish to read anything that is gratuitously violent or erotic, or contains excessive gore. Animal cruelty of any sort is unacceptable to us.

It goes without saying, but we’re saying it anyway:

Frazzled Lit will not tolerate work that has been generated by AI, or for which AI has been used in any form to create it.