Announcing the Inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize

Early Bird Entries Now Open! ★ Awarding Story of the Year & Essay of the Year

Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We’ve now been a living, breathing lit mag for six whole months. When we first created Strange Pilgrims, we really didn’t know if we’d be able to last the year. As you all know, we’re a two-person team and do pretty much everything ourselves. We love the world of indie lit and have been involved with it for over a decade now, so it’s something that feels like home. And though we know that the amount of work it takes to sustain even a small subsection of the arts is a heck of a lot than it might look from the outside, we are…inherently, fools, and obsessed with trying to innovate, create, and uplift the practice of reading and writing, especially the weirder stuff and folks (like us) who might often be overlooked by the more “mainstream” spaces.

We’re grateful that we now have 290 paid subscribers, which allows for us to cover contributor payments and artist commissions as well as pay for platforms like Tally, Notion, Figma, etc.

Your support & enthusiasm has also allowed us to dream of new things we can try, and one of those things is what we’re announcing today (weird sentence sorry not sorry?):

The inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for

Story of the Year & Essay of the Year!

How it works

Send us your best (or strangest, wildest, craziest, purest, est-est) story or essay (or both!) — up to 10,000 words — by August 31st. Two pieces shall claim victory and be named the Strange Pilgrims Story of the Year and the Strange Pilgrims Essay of the Year.

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TIMELINE

Opens: July 1

Deadline: August 31

Reading Period (to evaluate submissions): 8-12 weeks after closing

Results Announced: November

Winners Published: December

We will respond to everyone before the results are announced publicly.

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AWARD

• Story of the Year: $1500 USD

• Essay of the Year: $1500 USD

Aaaand, we have partnered with Curtis Brown/UTA — one of the top literary agencies in the world. Both winners will also receive:

• A one-on-one conversation with a Curtis Brown/UTA agent about their work and writing career.

• A six-week Curtis Brown Creative online writing course (worth £250) of their own choosing

• Guidance on your path to literary representation and if the shoe fits, then an offer of representation from one of the Curtis Brown/UTA agents

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SUBMIT

• Stories & essays up to 10,000 words in any genre and style

• Previously unpublished work only (though social media/personal Substack publication is alright)

• Do not include your name or identifying information in the document or the title of your submission

• All submitted work is considered for publication in Strange Pilgrims

• All writers who submit their work are considered for representation by Curtis Brown/UTA Agents

• Simultaneous submissions are totally fine, but please let us know promptly if your piece is accepted elsewhere with the words “Withdraw” in the email somewhere.

  

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FEE

• Early Bird: $18 ^{until Jun 30}

• Regular: $22 ^{Jul 1-Aug 31}

Perks: Everyone who enters gets 3 months of Strange Pilgrims membership free (with no annual commitment requirement), effectively making the entry free + an extra month. You can see all the paid subscriber perks here. The reason we’re doing things this way is because we believe that a contest entry should also offer you more access to the place you are submitting to and thus supporting. If the fee is a barrier, please refer to our waiver policy below.

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JUDGING CRITERIA

• Judging process: Your work will be solely human-evaluated. We, the editors (Karan & Shannan) will read each and every submission ourselves. Within the first few weeks, we’ll longlist a selection of stories and essays, which will then be shared with the team over at Curtin Brown who are working with us. In collaboration with these agents, we’ll come up with a shortlist. The final winners will be selected by us, Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor.

• Judging criteria: In evaluating submissions, we look for originality, an authentic voice (something that only you could’ve written), emotional intensity, musicality of language, cohesion of plot, characters & narrative.

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AI POLICY

Writing is an act of imagination, research, and memory—one mind reaching for another. Artists hold the pulse of the human condition in a way machines never will. They catch what algorithms miss—the contradictions, hesitations, tiny human errors that turn into revelation. An artist’s work carries the weight of lived time, of memory and forgetting, grief and joy that can’t be squeezed into a template.

For that reason, we only publish work written by humans. We’re utterly uninterested in outsourcing imagination. Literature has always been a conversation between people across time and place, and we intend to keep it that way.

For more details on the nature of literary contests, our full Transparency & Fairness Statement, and contest disclaimers, please read this post:

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Yours,

Shannan & Karan