Short Story Competition

First prize: £1,000
Second prize: A Cross Sauvage fountain pen, worth over £100
Five runners-up prizes: excellent reference guides
All the prize-winning stories will be published next year in The Lady.


If you have always dreamed of having one of your stories published, now is the time to turn fantasy into reality by entering our Short Story Competition. We invite you to write a story in one of the following categories:

* COMEDY
* HISTORICAL
* MYSTERY

Prizes: You can make up your own title for your short story, which should be between 2,000 and 2,200 words in length. It must be printed double spaced, on A4 paper – on one side of the paper only. If you can, please include a floppy disk, on which your short story is saved, in a separate envelope, firmly secured to your print-out. Make sure that you keep a copy of your story as we cannot return either manuscripts or disks. Only one short story per person can be entered.
How to enter

Send your story in to: The Lady Short Story Competition, Editorial Department, The Lady, 39-40 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ER to arrive by 16 December 2008. Please include a daytime telephone number (and an email address, if you have one) with your details. All the winning stories will be published next year in The Lady .

First prize

The winner will receive a cheque for £1,000 from The Lady .

Second prize

Cross’ excellent range of pens includes the beautiful Cross Sauvage fountain pen, worth £115. Stylish and elegant, this luxury pen has a Giraffe design with a brown tourmaline finish. Call 01582-422793 (or visit: www.cross.com ) to locate your nearest stockist.

Prizes for the five runners-up

* The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2009 (A&C Black , £14.99) is an invaluable guide to the literary world. It offers advice on writing, copyright queries, societies, prizes and how to set up your own web page, and is recommended by The Writers’ Guild. Now it has been revised and updated, with a foreword by novelist Kate Mosse and advice including how to publish books from blogs, ebooks and writing for soap operas. (Visit the website: www.writersandartists.co.uk .)

* The 11th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press , £25) contains over 240,000 words, phrases and definitions and covers technical and scientific vocabulary as well as English from around the world. It has been updated with hundreds of new words and phrases, such as “sub-prime”, “social networking” and “carbon footprint”. (Visit the website: www.oup.com .)

* Writer’s Market UK 2009 (David and Charles , £14.99) has a foreword by Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat . It is an annual resource for writers and one of the most comprehensive guides to writing and getting published today. Whether you are taking a writing course, dreaming of being published or have already been published this book has the latest information, listing over 4,000 publishers, magazines and other outlets for writers to approach. It is full of practical tips and recommendations from expert contributors and successful authors. (Visit the website: www.davidandcharles.co.uk .)