Hello fellow strange pilgrims,
Tonight is the eve of Leonard Cohen’s birthday. In case you’ve somehow missed it, we—the editors behind this magazine—are lovers of Leonard Cohen, devotees, fans, worshippers, call-it-whatever-you-will-ers. Today we’ve opened for a very blink-and-you’ll-miss-it free general submission period in honor of LC.1 Some quick recap below on submission guidelines, friends, but if you already feel ready, then, gently kiss the button below (metaphorically speaking. You do need to click it, literally speaking).
Oh and if you’re a poet, then this is for you → Our sister mag, ONLY POEMS, is currently open for the official $3500 Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize until November 7, 2026. You may send up to 3 pages of poetry on the intersections of love, faith & sex.
You can also expect an update on our reading adventures for the inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for Story of the Year & Essay of the Year soon. And I’m at work on a few more exciting editorial pieces. Upcoming: Leonard Cohen Was Right: 11 Prophecies, Prayers & Reflections from the Poet Laureate of the World!
Submission Guidelines
Submit:
Short Stories (up to 10,000 words)
Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (up to 10,000 words)
Flash Fiction (under 1500 words)
Flash CNF (under 1500 words)
This is an un-themed call. Your writing can be about anything. Though as a refresher:
We’re not married to any genre, structure, or subject. We love surreal, speculative, and fabulist stories; unhinged, lyric, and fragmented essays; voice-driven experimental narratives and slow-burn realism; cultural and literary criticism; hyper-intellectual riffs and children’s stories — so long as they move. If your work is honest, well-crafted, and offers something emotionally and intellectually vivid, we want to read it.
Some of the writers who guide our taste: Gabriel García Márquez, Susanna Clarke, Toni Morrison, Tom Robbins, Brian Doyle, Han Kang, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Geetanjali Shree, Leo Tolstoy, Mariana Enriquez, David Foster Wallace, Lidia Yuknavitch, Chuck Palahniuk, Clarice Lispector, Ted Chiang, Ali Smith, Milan Kundera, Saadat Hasan Manto, Karen Russell, Fernando Pessoa, and many, many others.
Deadline: Sep 22 midnight
Eligibility: Open to anyone writing in English, anywhere in the world
Restriction: No previously published work (but self-published on your blog/Substack/etc. is fine!)
Evaluation: All submissions are read by us, Shannan Mann & Karan Kapoor, the editors of Strange Pilgrims (& ONLY POEMS)
Response time: Within 4 months
Optional: $10 Fast Response (response within 4 weeks)
Payment: If selected for publication, we pay $200 for long-form writing, and $50 for flash (via PayPal or Wise).
More details on what we’re looking for alongside a list of our favorite writers can be found on our About page.
And always remember:
& we’ll add to that: be a strange pilgrim!
Though this is technically a 24-hour reading period honoring LC’s birthday (Sep 21!), we get a lot of emails and DMs from folks in different time zone and since we ourselves have lived across time-zones, we get it! So, open early, friends, a bit more than 24 hours. Now, go submit! & hurry, this will close very soon.
🤬🤯🫣 just seen this … on 23rd! Aaargh. Always late. Will enjoy reading others’ though x
Hi, can we submit a different piece if we currently have a piece submitted from the call 2+ months ago?