Call for submissions: The Best Asian Short Stories 2022

Kitaab is seeking short story submissions for The Best Asian Short Stories 2022 anthology, the latest in the annual TBASS series of anthologies celebrating the Asian short story as a constantly evolving, innovative and vibrant mode of literary expression.

The focus of our 2022 issue is chope, the Singaporean practice of reserving a space, although of course stories on other themes will also be considered. We are looking for well-crafted literary fiction. To chope is to briefly mark a shared space as yours, to manage your own interests respectfully within the crowd, to get along while you get what you want (or some of it).

The anthology will be published in the second quarter of 2022. (Check out our earlier anthologies here)

We will also select some web-extra stories: these stories won’t make the TBASS 2022 print edition but will be published as Web specials.

Editor Professor Darryl Whetter also invites superbly written creative non-fiction (of the narrative kind, in the ‘true stories, well told’ mode, not, here, the plotless but admirably reflective kind).

The Best Asian Short Stories 2022 anthology will be edited by Professor Darryl Whetter, a novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, scholar, literary journalist and the former and inaugural director of the Creative Writing master’s program at Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts. His latest books are the 2020 climate-crisis novel Our Sands, from Penguin Random House, and the international anthology Teaching Creative Writing in Asia from Routledge (2021). His other novels include the multi-generational smuggling epic Keeping Things Whole (2013) and the bicycle odyssey The Push & the Pull (2008). His debut collection of short stories, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur (2003), was followed by two poetry collections: Origins (2012) and Search Box Bed (2017). He has been a campus or festival author in Bali, Penang, Australia, Singapore, Wales, London, the USA and Canada. He is currently a professor of writing and literature at Canada’s Université Sainte-Anne.

Submissions between 3000-5000 words should be e-mailed to tbass2022submissions@gmail.com (cc kitaab.sg@gmail.com). Pls write the following as subject header: Submission/TBASS2021/author’s name

Eligibility

Asians of all nationalities living anywhere in the world are eligible. By ‘Asian writers’, we mean all writers who belong to the continent of Asia. Non-Asian authors who have resided in and written extensively about an Asian country will also be considered.

Deadline

31 December 2021

Submission Fee

Free for annual subscribers of Kitaab (Become a subscriber here at S$10 a year). Please mention your membership status along with your submission.

All submissions by new Kitaab members must be made together with the fee receipt or screenshot.

Resident citizens of the following countries are exempted from submission fees/Kitaab membership requirements (you don’t have to be a member of Kitaab to submit your story): Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Yemen, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, North Korea, Cambodia, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iraq, and Timor-Leste.

(for fee waiver requests in case of financial difficulties, please write to us at kitaab.sg@gmail.com)

Format

Submissions must be MSWORD (.doc/.docx) attachments, typed double spaced in Times New Roman 12. The submission should also be pasted within the body of the covering mail. The subject line of the email should read as:

Submission/TBASS2022/author’s name. Please include an author bio note of 100 words. Only one submission will be considered from each writer.

Previously published work in print or online (including blogs, magazines or other online fora) or translations from other languages will not be accepted. Simultaneous submissions are not encouraged but will be considered. Please inform us immediately if the story is accepted elsewhere.