The George Garrett Fiction Prize

About

Winner Receives: $2,000 + Publication

2025 Judge: Fernando A. Flores

Established in 1998, The George Garrett Fiction Prize highlights one book a year for excellence in a short story collection or novel. Starting 2024, the Prize comes with a $2,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 10 copies of the published book.

Recent judges include Kaveh Akbar, Manuel Muñoz, Vi Khi Nao, Selah Saterstrom, Joe Wilkins, and John McNally.

Submissions open each year on July 1 and close on September 30.

Submission Guidelines

Submit to The George Garrett Fiction Prize

General Guidelines

• Submissions are open July 1 – September 30.
• Submissions are accepted through Submittable only.
• A fee of $28 must be paid at the time of submission.
• Open to anyone writing in English. Translations are not eligible.
• Stories or excerpts may have been published individually in magazines or anthologies, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished.
• Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please notify TRP immediately by withdrawing the manuscript via Submittable if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere.
• Current and former students and faculty of Sam Houston State University are not eligible.
• Family and current or former students* of the final judge or TRP staff are not eligible.
• Current and former TRP authors are not eligible.
• Submitters must be 18+ years of age.
• Winner receives a $2,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 10 copies of the published book.

*Writers who studied with TRP staff or the final judge for a semester-length period are not eligible. Writers who studied with TRP staff or the final judge for two-week residencies, single workshops, or other instances less than a semester in length are eligible, provided the work submitted is previously unseen by TRP staff or the final judge.

Manuscript Guidelines

• Manuscripts may be novels or short story collections with a total word count of between 40,000 and 80,000 words.
• Please include a table of contents, title page, and page numbers.
• Please double-space and use a 12pt. font.
• Do not include an acknowledgments page.
• Submissions are anonymous. Please remove any identifying information from the manuscript.
• Submit as a .pdf, .docx, or .doc file format.
• No revisions will be accepted once the manuscript is uploaded.

Judge: Fernando A. Flores

Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collections Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and Valleyesque and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His most recent novel is Brother Brontë. He lives in Austin, Texas.

George Garrett

George Garrett (1929-2008), for whom this competition is named, is the author of thirty-two books and editor or co-editor of nineteen others. He earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton University and taught for forty years at the University of Virginia. Among his honors and awards are the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Sewanee Review Fellowship in Poetry, fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He won the T.S. Eliot Award of the Ingersoll Foundation, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.