This contest is currently closed.

The Big Moose Prize

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Big Moose Prize for an unpublished novel. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book. Prizes will be awarded on publication.

The Big Moose Prize is open to traditional novels as well as novels-in-stories, novels-in-poems, and other hybrid forms that contain within them the spirit of a novel.

Entry Period: December 1 - January 31 Early Bird Entry Period: November 1 - November 30 How to submit ›

How to Submit

Black Lawrence Press accepts submissions and payment of the entry fee exclusively through our online submission manager, Submittable. We are not able to accept submissions via email or postal mail.

Entries are read by senior Black Lawrence Press editors and a rotating panel of former Big Moose Prize winners. That panel currently includes:

-Tracy DeBrincat, author of Hollywood Buckaroo

-Ron Nyren, author of The Book of Lost Light

-Jill Stukenberg, author of News of the Air

All manuscripts should include a title page (listing only the title of the work), and when appropriate, an acknowledgments page and table of contents. Manuscripts should be paginated and formatted in an easy-to-read font such as Garamond or Times New Roman. Manuscripts should be 90-1,000 pages in length, not including front and back matter (table of contents, title page, etc.). Identifying information for the author should not be included anywhere on the manuscript itself. You are welcome to include a brief bio or something about yourself in your cover note on Submittable, which will only be made accessible to the editorial panel after the group of Semi-Finalist and Finalist manuscripts has been chosen.

Need help with our submissions manager?
Visit http://help.submittable.com

We look forward to reading your work!

2023 Winner

Leslie Li

For The Forest For the Trees

Leslie Li is the author of the novel Bittersweet (Tuttle Publishing), the culinary memoir Daughter of Heaven (Arcade Publishing), and Just Us Girls (Four Seasons Press), the official companion book to her forthcoming feature-length documentary, The Kim Loo Sisters, currently in post-production. Her awards include the 2023 Big Moose Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction, and grants from the Freeman Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Chinese Heritage Foundation. The Kim Loo Sisters was one of the five finalists in The Paley Center for Media Doc Pitch in 2015 and was given private preview screenings in Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, the Twin Cities, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston. Her personal essays and feature articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Gourmet, Saveur, Travel & Leisure, Garden Design, Modern Maturity, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and other print and online publications. Her début novel and culinary memoir have been translated into five languages. She lives in New York City.

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