Taking Submissions: Children of the Blind Owl

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Deadline: August 31st, 2024
Payment: $150 – $250
Theme: Original weird tales and essays set in the Middle East that explore the human (and inhuman) experience through the lens of weird fiction and horror

Sentinel Creatives has opened up for submissions for our anthology of Middle Eastern Horror: “Children of the Blind Owl”.

Deadline for Submissions: 31 August 2024
Wordcount: 3,000 – 6,000
Remuneration: $150 – $250
Simultaneous Submissions: Yes

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

We’re looking for original weird tales and essays set in the Middle East that explore the human (and inhuman) experience through the lens of weird fiction and horror.

We are looking to secure 11-13 tales of weird fiction and 1-3 essays (any length). Submissions should delve into the history, folklore, ideas, experiences, identities, religion, and philosophies of the region in some way.

Time Period: We are looking for stories in both historical and contemporary settings.

As the title of this anthology suggests, one of the inspirations behind this project is Sadegh Hedayat’s “The Blind Owl,” a surrealist, horror, weird fiction, novella completed in the 1930s. Though we hope the stories in this anthology take inspiration from Hedayat’s work, we are not looking for stories set in or derived from his novella or other works. Rather, we are hoping writers will take cues from the themes Hedayat grappled with: alienation, futility, despair, rage, transgression, to name a few.

Ahmed Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad” is another work that serves as a good example of what we’d like to see from the stories in this anthology. Saadawi uses, to great effect, some of the vocabulary and motifs from horror to illustrate the problems facing modern-day Iraq, with the corpse itself representing, in some ways, the various ethnic and religious groups and ideologies sewn together as Iraqi pluralism.

Give us your tales of the uncanny, of the monstrous and surreal!

Contributing editors, voice artists, and artists will be announced for this project at a later date.

While this is by no means an exclusive call, we hope to attract writers who are either from the region or have some relationship with it.

REMUNERATION

All accepted stories will be paid for upfront!
Accepted stories can expect between $125-$200.
In exchange, we ask for exclusive rights to publish the story. Said rights will maintain for the duration of one year.
After that, we retain the non-exclusive rights to the story, but you’re welcome to submit and publish elsewhere after that!

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Send your submissions to: [email protected] with the subject “MIDDLE EASTERN HORROR”.
All manuscripts should be sent as a word document.
Our preference is for Times New Roman or another clearly legible text.
Submissions should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words.
This is not a hard limit, but preference will be given to those stories that meet this requirement.
Please include a short summary of the story in the body of the email, as well as a short bio and a list of any previously published works.

We’re looking for original works that have not been previously published! We accept simultaneous submissions!

About Us

If you’re unfamiliar with Sentinel Creatives, we’re an indie publishing and production house based in Cape Town, South Africa. We maintain a weekly Substack profile, a monthly podcast show, as well as more traditional publishing roles! Though our focus is on books, we have moved into the audiobook and radio-play sphere, and our larger projects include various other creative endeavours (illustration, sculpting, painting, composing etc.)

Via: Sentinel Creatives’s Newsletter.

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