The Fiddlehead is Atlantic Canada's International Literary Journal. Celebrating 75 years of literary foraging in 2020! 

The Fiddlehead is Atlantic Canada's International Literary Journal.

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The Fiddlehead

$2000 CAD for Best Short Story! 

 

         Good luck to all entrants. This year's contest deadline is Tuesday, September 1, 2026 (postmarked for mailed entries and 11:59 pm Pacific Standard Time for Submittable entries). Our judge this year is Kirti Bhadresa!
Kirti Bhadresa
Kirti Bhadresa lives in Calgary, Alberta on Treaty 7 territory. Kirti has fiction and nonfiction writing in many publications includingThe Fiddlehead,Prairie Fire, andRoom Magazine. Her first book, a short story collection entitledAn Astonishment of Stars, was published in October 2024 by ECW Press. The book was on the CBC Most Anticipated list and became an indie bestseller. It was a 2025 Writers’ Guild of Alberta Fiction Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.

 

 

 Contest General Rules and Information:

Fiction Contest

$2000 CA for Best Poem!

 

            Good luck to all entrants. This year's contest deadline is Tuesday, December 1, 2026 (postmarked for mailed entries and 11:59 pm Pacific Time for Submittable entries). Our judges this year are Farah Ghafoor, Fawn Parker, and Patricia Young.
Farah Ghafoor

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Named a CBC Best Book of the Year, Shadow Price was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award and the Toronto Book Awards. Selections of Ghafoor’s debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, shortlisted for the Far Horizons Award, and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work appears in various anthologies, podcasts, radio shows, post-secondary course curriculums, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice? (2025) and Structural Integrity (2025), as well as in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead. She lives in Tkaranto (Toronto).
Fawn Parker

Fawn Parker is a poet, novelist, and researcher from Toronto. Her most recent novel Hi, It's Me (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Writer's Trust Atwood Gibson Prize and the Governor General's Award. Her debut poetry collection Soft Inheritance (Palimpsest) won the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Fawn is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow with the York University Mad Studies Hub.
Patricia Young

Patricia Young has published thirteen collections of poetry. She has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and twice received the B. C. Book Prize for poetry. Her work is published in the Best Canadian Poetry (Biblioasis, 2026) edited by Mary Dalton. A chapbook, Otherwordly, will be published with the Alfred Gustav Press in 2027.
Contest General Rules and Information:
Entries must be original and unpublished. No simultaneous submissions and no previously published (or accepted for publication) submissions. This means that an entry must not be under consideration elsewhere for publication, nor accepted elsewhere for publication, nor entered in any other contest. Work that has appeared on the internet (e.g., online magazines, blogs, or social media sites) is considered published for the purposes of this contest and is ineligible.
In solidarity with authors whose work has been used to develop LLMs without permission or payment,The Fiddleheadwill not publish submissions that have been AI-generated or have been developed using AI as a tool.
An entry must be the original work of the person who is submitting it and the name and contact information provided must be the author’s. Contest entries should be submitted under the author’s real name. If you use a pseudonym for your published works, you will have a chance to inform the editor of this should your work be selected by the judges
All entries must be submitted by mail or via Submittable. This year's contest deadline is Tuesday, December 1, 2026 (postmarked for mailed entries and before 11:59 pm Atlantic Standard Time for Submittable entries). No faxed or emailed submissions are allowed.
The Fiddlehead will not read work that is ableist, misogynistic, queer-phobic or racist.
No revisions or changes may be made to an entry once you have submitted it. So please carefully check your entry before you enter it into the contest.
Judging for the contest is anonymous. Do not put your name or contact information or other identifying information (e.g., publishing pseudonyms) anywhere on your actual entry. For mailed entries place your name and contact information on an accompanying cover page along with information about the submission requested below. For Submittable entries, there will be a place on the Submittable form for your name and contact information.
One poetry entry is up to 3 poems; no more than 100 lines per poem, including blank lines. If a poem is longer than one page, please make sure that each page is numbered and has the poem’s title in the header. Each poem should start on a new page. Poems may be single spaced. For mailed entries the title and the number of lines for each poem should be noted on the cover page. For Submittable entries, the title and the number of lines for each poem should be noted in the Submittable form.
The entry fee for your first entry depends on where you are living. If your address is in Canada, then the fee for first entry is $35 CAD. Additional entries after that first contest entry are $10 CAD. If you do not live in Canada, then the fee accounts for the exchange rate and is $50 CAD (approximately $40 USD) for the first entry and $10 CAD for additional entries.
You must submit a first entry (and pay the first entry fee) before submitting an additional entry. If you submit an additional entry without first submitting that first entry, your entry may be disqualified, and the entry fee will not be returned.
You will receive a one-year subscription to The Fiddlehead with your first entry. New subscriptions will start with the next issue published after the contest closes. Already a subscriber? — you'll receive a one-year extension to your current subscription. Additional entries do not receive an additional subscription or subscription extension.
The Fiddlehead occasionally swaps its subscription list with other literary organizations. If you don't wish to be included in such exchanges, please state this on your entry's cover page.
The contest winner will be contacted directly (by either email or telephone) 2-3 months after the contest deadline. Other entrants will not be individually contacted about the results. Authors’ names and the titles of the works that make a shortlist of 10-15 will appear on The Fiddlehead website. The winner will be announced on the website and on The Fiddlehead social media spaces at a later date.
The winning entry will be published in issue #311 of The Fiddlehead and on our website. There is a publication payment in addition to the contest prize. The current publication payment rate is $65/page.
The winner will be interviewed. The interview will be published on The Fiddlehead website when the issue featuring the winning piece is published.
An entry will be disqualified (no matter at what stage in the contest process it is at), if it is discovered that an entry has violated the contest rule on simultaneous submissions, prior publication, or original authorship. The entry fee will not be reimbursed; however, the entrant will still receive the one-year subscription if the entry was an initial entry.
An entry may be disqualified (no matter at what stage in the contest process it is at), if it is discovered that the author entered that entry as an additional entry and never submitted and paid for a first entry. The entry fee will be not be reimbursed; and if a subscription was started in error, it will immediately be cancelled.
You can only upload ONE file when entering via Submittable, (pdf, doc or .docx preferred; rtfs acceptable). Do not include a cover letter or bio as part of that file. Cover letters and bios will be deleted from any entry file.
Remember only use the additional entry category IF you have already submitted and paid for a first contest entry.
For mailed entries:

            Please send mailed submission to:

 The Fiddlehead

              Campus House

              11 Garland Ct

              University of New Brunswick

              PO Box 4400   

              Fredericton NB  

              E3B 5A3  

              Canada

 Please make cheque payable to The Fiddlehead.

The Fiddlehead

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Featured Call

Poetry Contest — The Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem

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