United States

Contests filed under United States are the ones run from American cities, judged by American editors, and tied to the reading habits of that market. They range from a prize named for a short story master to a science fiction contest that has launched careers, and from a crime debut award to a lifetime-recognition honor. What they share is a home base, not a genre.

The Drue Heinz Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award both carry a name a reader may already know from a shelf, and both sit here rather than under United Kingdom, Australia or Canada. The First Crime Novel Award and the Hemingway Short Story Competition pull in writers working at the start of a manuscript, while Writers of the Future and the Young Lions Fiction Award reach toward speculative and debut fiction respectively. What holds them together is not a single genre but a single country: each one is run from the United States and judged by readers and editors working inside its literary culture. That is the line between this tag and its siblings. A competition based in London or Sydney or Toronto answers to a different set of magazines, agents and bookstores, and the work it rewards tends to sound different on the page. If you are after contests for writers in the USA, these six are the ones filed here.