About Us

The Stinging Fly is a Dublin-based print magazine and small press. Our mission is to seek out, nurture, publish and promote the very best new writing, steadfastly supporting and championing writers as they work towards a sustainable practice. All our work is guided by our enduring values of excellence, commitment, community and social justice.

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The Stinging Fly magazine

Thank you to everyone – all 3,700 of you – who submitted work to us during our May 2026 open submission round. These submissions will be read and considered for inclusion in our Winter 2026-27 issue, which will be published in November.

Details of our next open submission round will be posted here soon.

The Submittable link for each submission round is only available on our website’s Submission Guidelines page during the submission period.

Before submitting work to us, please read our Submission Guidelines carefully.

Submission windows close at 5pm (Irish time). 

Please note we no longer accept simultaneous submissions.

We publish new, previously unpublished work by Irish and international writers. We have a particular interest in publishing new writers and in promoting the short story. 

We publish two issues of the magazine each year, in May and November. We currently accept submissions of short stories, essays, poems, novel extracts and excerpts from longer works of nonfiction.

We are always excited to read new writers and to hear new voices in literature. Many of the writers we publish have never been published before.

We believe that a proactive approach to diversity and inclusivity is important in redressing imbalances of representation and diversity, both in the pages of our magazine and in the wider cultural landscape. As such, we strongly encourage submissions by writers from underrepresented areas of society.

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The Stinging Fly Press

The Stinging Fly Press publishes single-author short-story collections and multiple-author anthologies. We are not seeking submissions for the press at the moment. If you have written a collection, we advise that you submit a story to the magazine to begin with.

Online with Danielle McLaughlin

Online with Roisín O’Donnell

Hybrid with Jan Carson and Mary Morrissy

In-Person with Cathy Sweeney and Colin Barrett

To apply for a place: 

Fill in the application form provided here. 

Please take your time and answer the questions as fully as you can. This will help us to properly assess your application. Send 6 to 8 pages from a current work-in-progress, short story or novel.

Include your name, the title of the work, and the word count of the complete work on the first page.

All submissions should ideally be in Word doc or docx format.  Please use 1.5 or double line spacing, font size: 12pt, and insert page numbers.  

The Stinging Fly