Creative Writing Contests

The Calvino Prize

The Calvino Prize is an annual fiction competition sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the English Department of the University of Louisville. They will be awarded to outstanding pieces of fiction in the fabulist experimentalist style of Italo Calvino. Please note that these prizes are meant to encourage experimental writing, in the mode of Calvino, and are not meant to encourage merely imitative work.

The first place entry will be published in Miracle Monocle  journal at the University of Louisville. Further, the winner will be invited to read the winning entry, all expenses paid (within the continental US), at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 held at the University of Louisville every February. The 10 finalists will be posted on the website. 

First Place: $3000 and Publication
Second Place: $500

Submission Guidelines 

Past Winners

2022 Calvino Prize Winner:

 “Out, Out" by Emily Temple

Emily Temple is the author of The Lightness (William Morrow, 2020) and the Managing Editor at Literary Hub. She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was the recipient of a Henfield Prize. She lives with her husband and daughter in upstate New York. 

 ^{Photo credit: Nina Subin}

Runner-up

"Unidentified Black Male" by Nathan Dixon

Finalists

“Understanding Great Art and the People Who Make It” by Alexander Weinstein 

“The Widow” by Suzanne Burns 

“You Knit Me Together” by Catharine Mee 

“Sannata: Murder in the Archive” by Palvashay Sethi 

“Winter Crane” by S.P. Tenhoff                        

“The Shadow Artist” by Jeffrey Higa