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This contest is currently closed.

The Big Moose Prize

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Big Moose Prize for an unpublished novel. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book. Prizes will be awarded on publication.

The Big Moose Prize is open to traditional novels as well as novels-in-stories, novels-in-poems, and other hybrid forms that contain within them the spirit of a novel.

Entry Period: December 1 - January 31 Early Bird Entry Period: November 1 - November 30 How to submit ›

How to Submit

Black Lawrence Press accepts submissions and payment of the entry fee ($27) exclusively through our online submission manager, Submittable. We are not able to accept submissions via email or postal mail.

Entries are read by senior Black Lawrence Press editors and a rotating panel of former Big Moose Prize winners. That panel currently includes:

-Tracy DeBrincat, author of Hollywood Buckaroo

-Ron Nyren, author of The Book of Lost Light

-Jill Stukenberg, author of News of the Air

All manuscripts should include a title page (listing only the title of the work), and when appropriate, an acknowledgments page and table of contents. Manuscripts should be paginated and formatted in an easy-to-read font such as Garamond or Times New Roman. Manuscripts should be 90-1,000 pages in length, not including front and back matter (table of contents, title page, etc.). Identifying information for the author should not be included anywhere on the manuscript itself. You are welcome to include a brief bio or something about yourself in your cover note on Submittable, which will only be made accessible to the editorial panel after the group of Semi-Finalist and Finalist manuscripts has been chosen.

Need help with our submissions manager?
Visit http://help.submittable.com

We look forward to reading your work!

2022 Winner © Liz Linder Photography

Sara Johnson Allen

For Down Here We Come Up

Sara Johnson Allen was raised (mostly) in North Carolina. Her fiction has appeared in PANK Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Reckon Review. She was recently awarded runner-up in the 2022 Third Coast fiction contest. In 2018, she was awarded the Marianne Russo Award for Emerging Writers by the Key West Literary Seminar for her novel-in-progress. In 2019, she received the Stockholm Writers Festival First Pages Prize. She has also been awarded MacDowell fellowships and an artistic grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. When she is not grading papers or chasing after her three kids, she likes to write about ‘place’ and how it shapes us.    

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