The 2026 competition

The Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Award is open 3 July – 14 August.

New! Aotearoa and international submissions welcome! 

This competition calls for works of fiction up to 1888 words – a reference to the year of Mansfield’s birth. We take our themes from Mansfield’s writing. This year, the theme is ‘wild places’. All submissions must follow the theme, however loosely.

You can write your work in any form – short story or hybrid or another imaginative form, but please note this is not a competition for flash fiction (go here to find out more about the National Flash Fiction Day competition, and see Flash Frontier to read Aotearoa’s best flash). Stories should be considerably longer than a flash fiction.

Submissions need not be directly related to Katherine Mansfield. We encourage experimentation and outside-the-square thinking! Send your stories of quiet, strange, beautiful, oddball – and wild!

We look forward to reading your imaginative prose.

See website here