Stone Soup Editors

Stone Soup is seeking submissions for a book contest from writers aged 14 and younger. The winning manuscript will be published by Children’s Art Foundation–Stone Soup Inc. as a standalone book (see the other awards below). The contest is open to entrants around the world, writing in the English language, and accepts manuscripts in multiple genres, topics and forms: you may submit a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. As always, we are looking for excellent, innovative, unusual, powerful writing. As long as it meets the minimum length detailed below, it qualifies for submission. You have the summer to work on your book. We can’t wait to read it! Contest Details Length: For prose (fiction or memoir) submissions, the minimum length is 4000 words. For poetry submissions, the minimum length is 30 pages. There is no maximum word or page limit. Deadline: August 21, 11:59 p.m. (Pacific time). (deadline extended by 7 days on August 2) Entry fee: $15 per manuscript. Results: We will select three winners, all of which will be published in various forms, and made available for sale on Amazon, in the Stone Soup store, via our distributors, and advertised along with the rest of our books to libraries and other vendors. Prizes and Publication: First place: Manuscript published in both print and ebook forms. Second place: Manuscript serialized (i.e. published in sections over several months) in print in Stone Soup Magazine, and published in its entirety as an ebook. Third place: Manuscript published as an ebook. Publication: Winning entries will be published in the form(s) described above, in early 2020. Age limit: The contest is open to authors aged 14 and younger. If you recently turned 15 (within 3 months of the deadline) and wrote your book when you were 14, we will accept your submission. To enter: All entries should be submitted via our Submittable site.

First Place “No Longer Blue” by Olivia Park, 12 Second Place “The Dreamer” by Claire Nagle, 12 Third Place “A Splash of Water” by Tara Prakash, 12 Honorable Mentions “Back in the Days” by Gemma Yin, 11 “Lilith’s Quest” by Sabrina Guo, 13 Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who participated; we and our partners at By Kids For Kids – Story Time Podcast loved working together, and we had fun reading your stories and thinking about how they would translate into an audio drama. In the process of judging this contest we realized that what works for the podcast and what works for Stone Soup Magazine are not quite the same thing. The guidelines we wrote focused on writing stories that would work for a dramatized telling on the podcast. We have learned that stories written that way do not fit with the work we publish in Stone Soup Magazine. For this reason, we have decided to publish the three stories we most admired on the website instead. AV Entertainment will be working over the coming weeks to make our winning story, “No Longer Blue,” into a Podcast episode, and we will prepare the top three placed stories for publication on our website. One of our Honorable Mentions, “Lilith’s Quest,” will also be recorded. We will add the relevant links as soon as the editing is done. Meanwhile, all our entrants will receive their other prizes, including year-long subscriptions for the top two, and copies of The Stone Soup Book of Fantasy Stories for all those placed. Congratulations everyone!