Bring your best ideas and discover what it’s like writing for a magazine or an anthology book.
You will also learn how to make your work stand out and how to work with an editor, how to revise and develop your writing. We are looking for poems, short stories, prose – any kind of creative writing as long as it is your own.
Magazine submission guidelines
- Submit up to 3 pieces (any form of creative writing) of no more than 500 words.
- Name of child. Full name preferred, but we will accept just a first name.
- Title for piece.
- No extracts – complete pieces only.
- You must either attend a Spark Young Writers group, or live or study in the West Midlands.
We ask for a parent’s email address which we will use to ask for consent to publish any writers who are under 18. For parents completing the form, if the young writer has an email address please include it and we will also send confirmation to that address.
Deadline for receipt of the writing: 6pm, 14th November, 2022.
Issue 25 of Spark Young Writers Magazine will be published in December 2022. This issue of the magazine has no prescribed theme.
Not all pieces submitted will be accepted. However, all submissions are acknowledged with constructive criticism offered by our professional editor. We will make minor edits to spelling, punctuation and grammar, to improve readability where necessary.
Anthology submission guidelines
- Submit up to 2 pieces of prose, each one up to 800 words. For poems, we can accept up to three pieces with a combined total of 70 lines.
- Name of child. Full name preferred, but we will accept just a first name if necessary.
- Title for piece.
- No extracts – complete pieces only.
- Name of group.
- You must have attended at least one Spark Young Writers session since September 2021.
We ask for a parent’s email address which we will use to ask for consent to publish any writers who are under 18. For parents completing the form, if the young writer has an email address please include it and we will also send confirmation to that address.
Deadline for receipt of the writing: 6pm, 18th July 2022
The next anthology will be published in September 2022.
We will publish any writing you send us, as long as it meets our submission guidelines. We will make only minor changes to spelling, punctuation and grammar, to improve readability where necessary.
How to submit:
If you are a young person aged 8 – 20 living or studying in the West Midlands, you can submit up to 3 pieces each of no more than 500 words in length. The work should be uploaded via the submission form as a Word document, or rich text document.
The Editor will chose from the submissions and not all pieces may be included. Everyone will receive feedback from the editor about their writing. Please note that as this is an online, text based magazine, images are not included in the magazine itself. On the whole, we tend not to accept extracts of pieces.
Please see our Terms and Conditions for more information about the magazine and its content.