Miami University Press Novella Contest
Editor’s note: We expect to post details about the 2009 contest by February; please check back.
About the novella and our contest
The novella form has had a long and distinguished place in American literature, and has triumphed in the hands of Herman Melville, Henry James, Katherine Anne Porter, Stanley Elkin, Cynthia Ozick, Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Gass, John Gardner, Andrea Barrett and Tobias Wolff, to name just a few.
As commercial publishers are driven more and more by marketplace concerns, novellas, by nature of their length, often fall between the cracks of short story collections and novels and wind up being published—if at all—not as individual volumes but as part of a collection of stories. Because the form is such a pleasure for readers and writers alike—short enough to be read at a single sustained sitting, but long enough to allow the writer greater freedom in character and plot development than does the short story—we are happy to present a rare venue for publishing individual novellas as stand-alone volumes.
Manuscripts submitted for the award will be read and evaluated by our creative writing faculty, all of whom are active publishing writers. The manuscripts will be read “blind;” in other words, all identifiers will be stripped from the pages before the manuscripts are read, and the author’s history of previous publication will not be available to readers. Each year a different member of our faculty will serve as the final judge and will decide from among the list of finalists submitted by the other readers.
Students, former students, faculty, former faculty, or anyone connected to Miami University will not be considered for the award. Though we believe strongly in the talent of those we have worked with and taught, we will do everything we can to assure that this prize is administered impartially, fairly, and without regard to association.
Miami University Press is a non-profit organization. Though we are requiring an entrance fee (currently $25), we wish to make it clear that this money will be used to pay for the administrative costs of the contest, to help with the costs of publishing a book of high quality, and to allow each entrant to receive a copy of the winning volume. We want that book to be a pleasure to hold in the hands and to read. The winning volume will be distributed nationwide.
2008 winning entry
Congratulations to Lee Upton, whose entry The Guide to the Flying Island has been selected as the winner of the 2008 MU Press Novella Contest. The final judge was fiction writer and Visiting Assistant Professor Joseph Bates. For a sneak preview of Upton’s book, read on:
Off the coast of the small town of Truror is an island steeped in local legend, a place once home to mysterious religious orders and apocryphal lost settlements…a place that seems, in the right fog, to lift right out of the water and fly. This peculiar past has made the island, in the present, something of a minor tourist attraction, where devoted pilgrims and the merely curious come to climb the steps to the island’s peak, visit its rudimentary chapel or giant metal cross, or sit in its giftshop-turned-teashop enjoying the unusual destination once covered by the BBC for a full seven minutes.
But it’s on one such routine Friday tour that Jake Isinglass, a native son of Truror and a guide to the island, witnesses something he can’t explain: a striking, ethereal young nun who falls off the island’s cliffs to her death…or perhaps jumps to her death…or vanishes into thin air….or was never there at all. What follows in Jake’s investigation of the incident—or the apparition—finds him trying to reconcile not just the island’s strange, sometimes difficult history but his own.
Written in evocative, atmospheric prose, The Guide to the Flying Island is at once a ghost story, a mystery, and a meditation on the ways our present lives remain haunted by the secrets and the sins of our pasts.
2008 Finalists:
- Folly by G.K. Wuori
- In the Time of the Feast of Flowers by Tina Egnoski
2007 winning entry
- A Fight in the Doctor’s Office by Cary Holladay
2006 winning entry
- Badlands by Cynthia Reeves
2005 winning entry
- The Waiting Room by Albert Sgambati