The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest

Submissions for the Kenyon Review Fiction Contest are accepted electronically from December 1, 2025 through January 31, 2026.

The Kenyon Review publishes the winning story in print, and the author is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.

• Submit via our Submittable portal. We cannot accept paper submissions. 
• Writers must not have published a book of fiction at the time of submission. (We define a “published book of fiction” as a novel, novella, short story collection, or other fiction collection written by you and published by someone other than you in print, on the web, or in ebook format.)
• Submissions must be no more than 4,000 words in length.
• Please submit no more than once per year. 
• Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest. 
• Please do not submit work that has been previously published.
• Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript.
• The Submittable portal will remain active between December 1, 2025 and January 31, 2026. 
• The entry fee for the Short Fiction Contest is just $24, collected at the time of submission. All entrants are invited to claim a complimentary half-year Print plus Digital subscription to The Kenyon Review (for domestic addresses) or a half-year Digital-only subscription (for international addresses) through February 15, 2026. Your new half-year subscription toThe Kenyon Review will include the Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 issues. Current subscribers will receive a two-issue extension on their current subscription. As always, we will open in the fall for regular submissions, which we read at no cost to writers.

Winners will be announced in the late spring. You will receive an email notifying you of any decisions regarding your work.

2025 Fiction Contest Judge: Jamil Jan Kochai

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji  Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award  and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. His debut novel 99  Nights in Logar won John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Kochai was born  in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family  originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have  appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The O. Henry Prize Stories,  and The Best American Short Stories. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at  Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a  Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative  writing at California State University, Sacramento.

Thanks for your interest in The Kenyon Review!