Undergraduates may submit one work of fiction. Entries should be of reasonable length—in most cases a single short story, although the committee will consider a unified cycle of short stories or even a novel or a play. Students in the Writing Concentration who have written a novel or novella should consider submitting one chapter and accompanying it with a brief explanation of how the selection fits in the larger context. If you choose to submit a whole novel or cycle of stories, the Prizes Committee needs to be able to compare submissions of similar sizes. You must therefore attach a note specifying which story of the cycle or which 20-or-so page piece of the novel you choose for such consideration. Failure to so specify will not eliminate your submission from consideration, but it may significantly decrease your chances because judges will be making an arbitrary choice of the fragment to read.
Categories of Eligibility
(B-1) Fiction written by first-years.
(B-2) Fiction written by upper-years.
Submission Deadline
Thursday, April 18, 2024 at NOON.
We regret that we cannot accept late submissions.
Length and Number of Submissions
Upload a single pdf document containing one piece of prose fiction. (Recommended: 12 pt font, double-spaced.) One submission is allowed per genre unless you have received a faculty nomination.
Pseudonym and Title Page
Your name must not appear on the entry. Instead, choose a unique pseudonym containing more than one word to avoid possible duplication, and put the letters ps (for “pseudonym”) in parentheses after it. A new pseudonym should be chosen from year to year.
On the title page of your entry, provide your pseudonym (followed by ps), Yale class or graduate status, title of the piece, and the course for which it was written, if it was written for a course. In the upper-left corner of the title page, write the appropriate category (B-1 or B-2, as described above), not the names of prizes. Please take responsibility yourself for entering your work in the appropriate category. For example:
B-1
Eli Whitney (ps)
BK ’11
“A Reading of To the Lighthouse”
English 411
Submitting Your Entry
Follow the link below to upload your prize submission. PDF is recommended. The filename for each entry must include two pieces of information in this order: 1) prize category; 2) your pseudonym (ps).
Online Form Tip: log into your Microsoft account using your Yale email address and password. Please note that if you are trying to access the form while logged into any email on your browser that is not your Yale one, the page will not load.