We are happy to announce the birth of Samyukta Fiction (SF), a blog of the Samyukta Research Foundation!
SF will be curated and edited by the poet-academic Anupama Mohan. The blog will feature issues centred broadly on themes of topical and literary interest. SF is looking for original, unpublished writing. We prize literary merit over all else and are interested in work that is outstanding in form and content. Short stories or excerpts from longer works (such as a novel or fictionalised memoir) amounting to no more than 4000 words will be considered. Formally innovative writing that bends genre for creative purposes will also be considered, but please avoid sending us poetry, screenplays, drama, and nonfiction. (For poetry, please see our Samyukta Poetry blog curated by Sonya J. Nair.) In exceptional cases, a longer work may be published. While SF will publish only work in English, we invite writers and translators to collaborate and submit writings from other languages in English translation. Copyright remains with the writer (and/or translator) always; we only request that should you republish elsewhere a piece first run by SF, please acknowledge us in the republication. At the end of the first year of SF, we propose to publish the best of our featured stories as an edited volume of short stories (either in print or digital form).
Please submit your piece in accordance with the style guidelines provided below.
Anupama Mohan teaches English at Presidency University, Kolkata and is the author of Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012). She also edited a double-digest Special Issue for Postcolonial Text in 2019 titled “Maritime Transmodernities” that focused on Anglophone and Francophone literatures of the Indian Ocean. Her research has featured in peer-reviewed journals such as University of Toronto Quarterly, Economic and Political Weekly, and South Asian History and Culture, among others. Anupama is also a poet and short story writer; her first book, Twenty Odd Love Poems, was published by The Writers Workshop in 2008.
The inaugural issue of SF, slated for release on the day of the festival of Vishu (14 April) this year, will be themed around the idea of “reversal of expectations.” The sting in the tail or the volta is a popular, but challenging, narrative device by which a whole spectrum of themes and plots – traversing comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes – can be written. Some of the masters of the short story genre – Manto, Saki, Maupassant, Ambai, Basheer, Woolf, Joyce, and many more – have used the device of reversal/twist to stunning effects.
We challenge writers to try their hand at the volta, play with anagnorisis, epiphany, peripeteia – all these dramatic devices in the span of a short story of 4000 words or less.
Write something riotously funny or gut-wrenchingly sad, but push the limits of the short story and upturn readerly expectations.
Please consult our submission guidelines and send in your entries (only one per person) by 21 March 2021. All submissions are to be sent by email to: samyuktafiction@gmail.com
Call: 0471-4018628
Email: info@samyuktaresearchfoundation.org
Address:
Samyukta Research Foundation,
A Street, Jawahar Nagar, Kowdiar, Thiruvananthapuram
Kerala, 695003
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