Happy International Women's Day! We have a wonderful news announcement that suits this day to a tee! Every year we will ask authors to enter our free competition to submit the most daring, strange, unusual, difficult to place, piece of writing they have 'in their bottom drawer' (that is, unpublished), so that our editors can consider publishing one of them - and this year brilliant work came in from around the world. One superb, comic, political and strikingly original novella stood out: The winner for 2021 is...
Beatriz Seelaender! She was born in 1998 in São Paulo, Brazil. She's had essays published by websites such as The Collapsar and The Manifest-Station, and her short stories can be found in Psychopomp Lit Mag, The Gateway Review and others. Her story "A Kidney Caught in Quicksand", published by Grub Street in 2017, earned recognition from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association in the categories of experimental fiction and humour writing. In 2019, Seelaender won Hidden River Arts' Sandy Run Novella Award.
Her response to winning: 'As for my reaction: I can’t believe I actually won. I’m so glad I didn’t give up on this manuscript even after it got rejected so many times. Congratulations to everyone who participated, I’m sure your manuscripts will find a home no matter how long it takes, don’t lose faith! And of course, many thanks to Black Spring Press and the editors for believing in my work.'