Solas Awards

Friends, I hate to break it to you, but summer is rapidly vaporizing, all around us. How can we hold on, you ask? By capturing our summer adventures, of course! Travelers’ Tales has just announced its annual travel writing contest known as the Solas Awards. Here is the skinny:

The Solas Awards are an annual competition to find the best writing about the world today. Travelers’ Tales editors will choose winners in 21 categories, including: destination; adventure; humor; women’s; men’s; bad trip; transformation; food; kindness of strangers; culture and ideas; family; romance; cruise; character; sports; shopping; healing; memoir; elder (by an author age 65 or older); youth (by an author 18 – 25); and animals. The grand prize category has cash awards of $1,000, $750, and $500; all other category winners receive a certificate and a copy of the most recent edition of either Best Travel Writing or Best Women’s Travel Writing. Winners may also be published in other Travelers’ Tales anthologies. All entries submitted before midnight, September 21, 2010 will be eligible. Entries submitted after that will be entered in next year’s competition.

Rules: All entries for the award must be true stories. These pieces may have been previously published or not, but the writer must control all rights to the story. Stories may not violate anyone else’s copyright. Stories must be a minimum of 750 words but there is no maximum. We caution, however, that beyond about four thousand words stories begin to get difficult to contain, so we recommend shorter pieces in the 1000-3000 word range.

Entry fees: $20 for the first two optional categories, $5 for each additional category for the same story. All stories are automatically submitted for the Grand Prize. If we choose to publish a story in one of our books, we will pay our usual honorarium of $100 for non-exclusive world rights (that means you can sell it again whenever and wherever you want).

Should you wish to submit a story for one of our books without competing for an award, send it to submit@travelerstales.com. It will be given the same careful consideration as always for inclusion in upcoming anthologies.