Enter the 2012 LitPOP Awards

Matrix Magazine and POP Montreal are searching for poetry and short fiction submissions to the 2012 LitPOP Awards. Prize includes airfare, accommodation and a VIP pass to the POP Montreal Festival plus publication in Matrix Magazine. Entry fee $25. Visit: www.matrixmagazine.org/litpop and www.popmontreal.com for more information.

Deadline: July 1, 2012.

Incredible prizes for incredible writing:

The POP Montreal International Music Festival and Matrix Magazine have joined forces to bring you Canada’s most innovative and exciting literary competition. We are looking for writing that makes ears ring and throats hoarse. So if you can bring the rock heat with poetry and/or short fiction, it’s time to break some hearts and/or scare some parents. If you have what it takes, you will get your work published in Matrix, and get free travel to POP Montreal for a night in your honour.
The winners, one from each category, will receive a round-trip ticket to POP Montreal from September 19-23, 2012, a VIP pass to the Pop Montreal Festival, free accommodation at a bed and breakfast, fall publication in Matrix Magazine with full honorarium, and presentation at a special Matrix Litpop event during the festival.

Submit by July 1, 2012. Winners will be notified in August. Poets are asked to send no more than 5 poems; fiction and non-fiction writers should send stories of no more than 3000 words. Each entry is 25$ and entries and entry fees should be mailed to Matrix Publications, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., LB 658, Montreal QC, H3G 1M8. Please include your email address. Cheques or money orders should be made out to “Matrix Publications.” PayPal is also available. Multiple entries are welcome. Entries can also be emailed to litpop2012@gmail.com and will be considered valid once payment is verified. Full contest rules and regulations can be found at popmontreal.com and matrixmagazine.org/litpop.

The POETRY judge is Ken Babstock, the author of Methodist Hatchet (Anansi 2011) and Airstream Land Yacht (Anansi, 2006) winner of The Trillium Prize for Poetry, finalist for the Governor General’s Award, The Griffin Prize for Poetry, and The Winterset Award. Earlier collections include Mean, winner of The Atlantic Poetry Prize and The Milton Acorn Award, and Days into Flatspin, winner of a K.M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset Prize. All three books were listed in The Globe and Mail‘s Books of the Year. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, appeared widely in anthologies in Canada, The US, and Ireland, and have been translated into French, German, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian and Czech. 

The FICTION judge is Melanie Little. Her debut book, the story collection Confidence, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and named one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 books of 2003. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops, Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places, Certain Things About My Mother, and Nerves Out Loud, as well as in magazines including The Malahat Review, sub-TERRAIN, Prairie Fire, Event, The Fiddlehead, and Books in Canada. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Georgia Straight, Vancouver Sun, and National Post. She is a past winner of the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and the Periodical Writers’ Association of Canada Journalism Award. Little holds a Masters of Arts in English Literature from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where she served as an editor of PRISM International. She is now the Senior Editor with Anansi Press.

Visit: www.matrixmagazine.org/litpop and www.popmontreal.com for more information!