The Ex-Puritan seeks submissions all year round, from anywhere in the world.
Our current publication rates (as of Fall 2022) stand as:
- $100 PER INTERVIEW
- $200 PER ESSAY
- $100 PER REVIEW
- $150 PER WORK OF FICTION
- $50 PER POEM, OR $100 PER POET IF MULTIPLE POEMS ACCEPTED
- $50+ PER EXPERIMENTAL OR HYBRID WORK, AT AN INCREASING SCALE DEPENDING ON THE NATURE OF THE PIECE
Check back with the magazine regularly; The Ex-Puritan is working ever assiduously to increase these figures.
Please note that we can ONLY issue payments using etransfer, PayPal or a cheque in the mail. We also pay in CAD. If you cannot accept payment via etransfer, PayPal or cheque from a Canadian bank, we cannot accept your submission.
Regular submissions to the magazine are free of charge and should fall under one of six categories: fiction, essays, poetry, interviews, reviews, and experimental/hybrid work. To submit to the experimental/hybrid section of the magazine, please email our section editors at hybrid.experimental@ex-puritan.ca. All other submissions must go through our Submittable. Unless we are soliciting your work, all submissions must be previously unpublished (this includes self-publishing, publishing on blogs, and in chapbook format). The entry fee for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence is $20; winners in fiction and poetry each receive $1,000 in cash prizes and runners-up are awarded $200.
Please note that in order to diversify the voices we publish, we have a limit on how frequently we will publish the same writer: you may publish with us once per year in up to two sections of the magazine.
All submissions received by March 25 will be considered for the spring issue, published in May. Those received by June 25 are considered for the summer issue in August. Those received by September 25 are considered for the fall issue, published in November. Those received by December 25 are considered for the winter issue, out in February. All submissions will receive a decision within four months of the submission date.
If you haven’t heard back from us in four months or for any other query not answered here, get in touch with us at editors@ex-puritan.ca. Please note that we CANNOT accept email submissions. They will be discarded.
We are open to simultaneous submissions for all regular submission categories, but no simultaneous submissions are permitted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please contact us immediately at editors@ex-puritan.ca to withdraw the piece.
The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence is now open! The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence serves to honour the memory of Austin Clarke (1934-2016). Clarke was, above all else, an exceptional writer, one who disrupted the expectations of what Canadian literature could and should become. His literary career was characterized by impressive productivity. In the span of his lifetime, he published eleven novels (including his 2002 Giller-winning The Polished Hoe), nine short story collections, two poetry collections, along with a number of memoirs. In this large body of work, he continually questioned the homogeneity implied with the development of a Canadian cultural establishment. He was deeply critical of the official Canadian position of multiculturalism, but to consider his work a “realist or sociological account of Black life in Canada” would be, as Paul Barrett notes in the introduction to his 2017 “‘Membering Austin Clarke: A Puritan Special Issue,” a fundamental misreading of the value of his writing. Although Clarke began his writing career as a reporter at the Timmins Daily Press and The Globe and Mail, his vast body of literary work has “never been realist, nor has it ever been reportage: it is a polyvocal, hybridizing, experimental, introspective, satirical, patriarchal, offensive, provocative and—at times—outraged artistic reflection on life in Canada” which “demands” a stylistic account.
We at The Ex-Puritan agree. We have long been admirers of Clarke’s work, and with this renaming our annual literary award, we want to encourage our readers and writers to think through what it means to rebuke the Canadian cultural establishment. We want our writers to continue Clarke’s legacy by reimagining the boundaries of Canadian literature. Equally important to this, however, is a focus on style. Although we divide this award by entries into fiction and poetry, we want our submitters to reimagine the boundaries of what fiction and poetry can look like. We actively encourage submissions that are experimental with form and unrelentingly demand an attention to their style. We believe that Austin Clarke would’ve wanted nothing less.
This year, the winners will be selected by Iryn Tushabe (for fiction) and Faith Arkorful (for poetry). Past judges have included Canisia Lubrin and Liz Howard.
Winners in each category will receive:
First Prize: $1,000
Runner-up: $200 We will announce our shortlist at the end of November and announce the winners in early December.
All submissions must be written in 11 or 12 point font. The documents must be .doc, .odt or .rtf files and must not have identifying information on them to ensure a blind process reading process (remove your name, address, and contact information from the document itself). For short story contest submissions, please include a word count. No works over 7,500 words or under 1,000 will be accepted or read. Each submission to the poetry contest can include up to 4 poems, or up to 4 pages (whichever comes first). No AI-generated work will be accepted. We welcome multiple entries in either genre. Entries must be previously unpublished, original work.
PLEASE NOTE: Only single-authored submissions will be accepted. While we accept collaborative works (work written by more than one person) for our regular submissions, collaborative works submitted to the Austin Clarke Prize will be automatically disqualified.
The entrance fee this year is $20, which helps us pay for the prize and compensate our judges with modest honorariums.
The deadline to enter is 11:59pm EST on October 24, 2025.
The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence is now open! The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence serves to honour the memory of Austin Clarke (1934-2016). Clarke was, above all else, an exceptional writer, one who disrupted the expectations of what Canadian literature could and should become. His literary career was characterized by impressive productivity. In the span of his lifetime, he published eleven novels (including his 2002 Giller-winning The Polished Hoe), nine short story collections, two poetry collections, along with a number of memoirs. In this large body of work, he continually questioned the homogeneity implied with the development of a Canadian cultural establishment. He was deeply critical of the official Canadian position of multiculturalism, but to consider his work a “realist or sociological account of Black life in Canada” would be, as Paul Barrett notes in the introduction to his 2017 “‘Membering Austin Clarke: A Puritan Special Issue,” a fundamental misreading of the value of his writing. Although Clarke began his writing career as a reporter at the Timmins Daily Press and The Globe and Mail, his vast body of literary work has “never been realist, nor has it ever been reportage: it is a polyvocal, hybridizing, experimental, introspective, satirical, patriarchal, offensive, provocative and—at times—outraged artistic reflection on life in Canada” which “demands” a stylistic account.
We at The Ex-Puritan agree. We have long been admirers of Clarke’s work, and with this renaming our annual literary award, we want to encourage our readers and writers to think through what it means to rebuke the Canadian cultural establishment. We want our writers to continue Clarke’s legacy by reimagining the boundaries of Canadian literature. Equally important to this, however, is a focus on style. Although we divide this award by entries into fiction and poetry, we want our submitters to reimagine the boundaries of what fiction and poetry can look like. We actively encourage submissions that are experimental with form and unrelentingly demand an attention to their style. We believe that Austin Clarke would’ve wanted nothing less.
This year, the winners will be selected by Iryn Tushabe (for fiction) and Faith Arkorful (for poetry). Past judges have included Canisia Lubrin and Liz Howard.
Winners in each category will receive:
First Prize: $1,000
Runner-up: $200
We will announce our shortlist at the end of November and announce the winners in early December.
All submissions must be written in 11 or 12 point font. The documents must be .doc, .odt or .rtf files and must not have identifying information on them to ensure a blind process reading process (remove your name, address, and contact information from the document itself). For short story contest submissions, please include a word count. No works over 7,500 words or under 1,000 will be accepted or read. Each submission to the poetry contest can include up to 4 poems, or up to 4 pages (whichever comes first). We welcome multiple entries in either genre. No AI generated work will be accepted. Entries must be previously unpublished, original work.
PLEASE NOTE: Only single-authored submissions will be accepted. While we accept collaborative works (work written by more than one person) for our regular submissions, collaborative works submitted to the Austin Clarke Prize will be automatically disqualified.
The entrance fee this year is $20, which helps us pay for the prize and compensate our judges with modest honorariums.
The deadline to enter is 11:59pm EST on October 24, 2025.