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We publish new, previously unpublished work by Irish and international writers.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.
The writer of the story must be aged 18 or over and must not yet have published fiction with The Stinging Fly, either in the magazine or online.
The writer must be either resident on the island of Ireland or consider the island of Ireland to be their home.
One previously unpublished story to be submitted per writer.
The story must be no more than 3000 words in length.
The story needs to be uploaded here as an attachment.
The author’s name should not appear anywhere on the document.
The story should be set in font size 12 (minimum) and use 1.5 or double line spacing.