Editor Interview: The London Independent Story Prize

Fiction and Screenplay

We aim to create a great networking opportunity for writers and a community that embraces multicultural differences, brave voices, unique writers, and extraordinary artistic approaches to story writing.
LISP looks for diverse talent, unheard stories, artistic approaches to the storytelling and experimental brave work as well as the stories that hone the classics and the traditions of writing forms.
We do have a great variety of writers on our longlists; both emerging and accomplished ones are able to make it there due to our unique jury board and multi-levelled scoring system. London Independent Story Prize publishes the interviews with all of these writers, we highly recommend everyone to read them. You'll see what other writers do, how they succeed when they struggle and what they do to overcome the challenges of writing. LISP values each writer no matter where they are in their career. We are always looking for new talent, just polish those stories and send them to us.

It's a hard question to answer, however, I can say that sometimes we receive submissions from a writer and they're not selected. Next round, we receive the same story (re-edited) or another story from them, and again and again ... These writers always get published at some point because they're determined to work on their pieces until they become publishable. Yes, I think, these are good writers, and great examples too. When they're longlisted, we publish their interviews and read about their life and writing life. We see how much effort they've put into their work despite the odds; now, that's inspiring.

LISP is unique with its variety of stories and diversity of writers. We do receive submissions from all around the world and writers know that we're open minded. We won't judge their writing style but embrace it. I think that's what makes LISP stand out from the crowd of writing competitions and publications.

Be true to yourself, re-edit it, and read it out loud to yourself. Don't blame the story, don't let it go unless it's not really working but save some good time to editing. Most of the time, a story fails because it is just not ready yet. I know, it's so hard to understand but if your story is not selected by a few competitions, and magazines, it's a good idea to re-edit it.
And sometimes, just sent it over to take your chance because you never know!

The ideal submission is the one that is within the word limit and other rules, really. LISP is extremely open-minded, we do select genre fiction, poetic, lyrical, cross-genre, literary, and commercial anything but it has to be original.

Now, this is a good question. We rarely have issues with the submission files. I rarely disqualify a submission because they're all within the word limits and follow the rules.
I have to give this credit to the LISP team. I'm so proud of them because they're fast in replying to questions of the submitters who have confusion about the rules or the submission process. And also the rules are quite clearly announced in emails and ads via social media. That makes things easier for the submitters and the jurors.

We don't need to know anything about the writers because the jury read anonymously. So we don't ask for a bio or credits; it doesn't matter. LISP is open to all writers from around the world and at any level of their careers.