Freelance Writing Jobs: the March round-up
Writing awards, bursaries and residencies with upcoming deadlines.
Hello! How are you doing today? I love Sunday mornings when the seasons are changing. This is when I dream and write whatever is niggling the back of my mind. Right now, that’s a piece of creative non-fiction about pottery, and I’m not sure what exactly I want to say yet, I’m just following the thread. That’s what makes it fun. A machine can’t do this. You can’t get to the heart of something without doing the actual writing. The initial scrappiness is more important than the polished version. The physical act of writing is the thing, not the finished product.
There are 40 brilliant opportunities in this issue, so I hope you find somewhere to submit your words, (which no doubt started out as scrappy drafts). Make sure you search the ongoing funding opportunities at the end of the email, too. They’re yours for the taking.
"A career-changing book... if you're thinking about going freelance, read this first," says GQ’s Oliver Franklin-Wallis.
My book The Pyjama Myth: the Freelance Writer's Survival Guide will make you a better, happier freelancer and you can order your copy from Bookshop.
Closing before the end of March (last day to apply after the link):
The Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize closes to submissions at midnight tomorrow. (17th)
The BBC National Short Story Award closes at 9am tomorrow. You need quite a strong publication record to enter this one, but it’s a goodie. (17th)
The Brick Lane Short Story Prize is such a brilliant champion of the form, but you’ve got to enter before 5pm tomorrow. (17th)
The Romanian Cultural Institute is offering three residency scholarships to foreign cultural journalists. There’s quite a lot of work involved in the application but you’ve got a few more days to get everything together. (19th)
There are so many great New Writing North Awards closing this month, details all on the same page: the Arvon Award for a prose writer, the Finchale Award for Short Fiction, the Northern Promise TLC Awards for writers who have faced barriers to their work for financial reasons or issues connected to disability, ethnicity and/or sexuality, the Sid Chaplin Award for writers from a working class background, and the Tempest Prize for an unpublished LGBTQ+ writer. (20th)