New Contrast

Established in 1960, New Contrast is devoted mainly to publishing original work by South African writers, and other activities incidental to that.

Submissions need to be made through Submittable. Prefers not to receive material via email as there are too many occasions for material to be lost. Contributions must be unpublished. Preferred file types are .doc or .docx. Also acceptable are .odt, .rtf, or .txt files.

Each piece (poem, short story, review etc.) must be in a separate document. In the case of poems that are part of a set that needs to be published together, these should be submitted as a single document. Each document must have your name in the header or footer. If the document exceeds a page, the pages must be numbered in the header or footer. Please include a 50 word biography and your postal address.

Readership is primarily English or Afrikaans speaking, so accepts submissions in English and Afrikaans. Will consider submissions in other languages if accompanied by a translation.

Length: keep your submissions short rather than long. Short stories should contain fewer than 6,000 words (the limit that the Caine Prize sets), and individual poems shorter than 75 lines.

Book reviews: does not publish reviews as a regular feature. However, should work be published which it thinks merits a review, it will follow through and publish a review, or group together a selection of reviews in a specific issue of the magazine. If there are any queries about this, please contact the Editor.