Guernica Global Spotlights

Guernica Global Spotlights excerpts previously published work outside the Western corridors of literary taste-making and prestige. We aim to highlight global innovation and experimentation in fiction and nonfiction – especially when it blurs the boundaries between genres – and to boost independent publishers and their writers. We welcome works in translation, including those that retain inflections of the original.

In fiction, we’re looking for short stories, novel excerpts, and hybrid texts. We welcome fiction born of different literary traditions that refract and reflect upon their contexts – fiction that is adventurous, unapologetic, experimental. We are interested in short stories, novel excerpts, and hybrid texts.

In nonfiction, we’re looking for essays, reportage, memoir, criticism, and hybrid forms – but we’re especially keen to see nonfiction that pushes against established forms or blurs boundaries, either by building new modes or complicating old ones.

Submissions in either genre should be between 3,000 and 7,000 words, published within the last year by magazines, zines, and independent publishing houses. We’re interested in work being written and published outside of the US and Canada, Western Europe, and Australia, but we are keenly interested in work by Indigenous writers in those geographies. (If your submission was originally published in the US, Canada, Western Europe, or Australia, by a non-Indigenous press, it will be declined without review.)

Writers, editors, and translators from these publications are eligible to submit work. Please include the name and contact information of the rights-holder (the person authorized to allow Guernica to re-publish the work in whole or in part). Please also specify which genre you’re submitting for. We aim to respond to all submissions quickly, and in no later than eight weeks.

Guernica offers an honorarium of $100, to the rights-holder, for Spotlights.