Deadline Extended to February 5 at Midnight!

Take the weekend to wrap up your entry—this biennial contest won't be back until 2020!

Submit your 10,000 to 20,000 word story for a chance to win $1500. Previous winning entries have also won or been nominated for National Magazine Awards for fiction and the O. Henry Prize.

Entry fee (comes with a one-year print subscription):
$35 CAD for Canadian entries
$40 USD for entries from the USA
$45 USD for entries from elsewhere

Additional entries cost $15 CAD from anywhere, no limit!

This year's judges are Jacqueline Baker, Eliza Robertson, and Richard Van Camp. Click their names to read interviews with the judges on what they'll be looking for in this year's submissions.

Full contest guidelines available on the Malahat website.

 

Malahat fiction board intern Holly Lam talks with Morgan Charles about memory, decay, and how time can shift your perspective.

 

HL: The voice [in your story] has a wryness to it, the humour surfacing through observations and judgments made by you as the narrator. Is this your own sense of humour, or did the narrative voice develop a personality of its own as the memoir took shape?

MC: Yes, that’s my own sense of humour, though I think I definitely sharpened it to my advantage during the writing and editing process. During the time that all of this was happening—my dad’s illness, my pregnancy, etc—I relied on humour a lot to cope with everything. “Gallows humour,” my dad called it. He was a very funny guy and always used humour to deal with his own fears, which is something I definitely inherited from him. He was also my first audience, and I always wanted to make him laugh. 

Read the rest of Morgan's interview on the Malahat website.

 

Malahat past editor John Barton talks with Andy Patton about Gramsci, Fascism, and "versions" of poems versus translations.

 

JB: For readers who may not know who Antonio Gramsci is, can you provide us with a thumbnail sketch of his life?

AP: Antonio Gramsci was the leader of the Communist Party in Italy during the early twenties, during the years that Fascism rose and Mussolini took power. He was jailed in 1926; at his trial, the judge famously said "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." He died in prison in 1937. In his thought, especially in The Prison Notebooks, you’ll find much of what led to Cultural Marxism. In that sense he was allied to Walter Benjamin and Adorno, who became so important after the Second World War. His concept of “hegemony” provided a possible answer to the question of why those who were exploited didn’t rise up and throw off their chains: culture seems to tie us into the larger system.

Read the rest of Andy's interview on the Malahat website.

 

On January 31, John Barton stepped down as the editor of The Malahat Review, after fourteen years.  For him, in his own words, “it has been a dream job,” one that has allowed him to work with a remarkable set of authors whose work he published in fifty-seven issues of the magazine. Highlights of his time with the Malahat include the “Green Imagination” issue, “At Home in Translation,” “Elusive Boundaries: CNF in Canada Today,” “Indigenous Perspectives,” and “Victoria Past, Victoria Present, Victoria Future.” His last issue will be Spring 2018, which shall appear this April.

Micaela Maftei, a member of the Malahat’s fiction board, has been chosen as the magazine’s interim editor.  Originally from Toronto, Micaela studied at the University of Toronto before moving to Scotland for postgraduate work. Five years later, she left with an M. Litt in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. Since arriving in Victoria in 2013, Micaela has taught at UVic and Camosun College. She is the author of The Fiction of Autobiography (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor of Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form (Gylphi, 2015). Her short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gutter, and various anthologies in the UK.

Read more on the Malahat website.