The Pygmy Giant

Here are some pygmy guidelines…

1. You must be from the UK (Great Britain or Northern Ireland). I’m not going to debate exactly what that means, but you must have lived here for the majority of your life! We’re a rare little haven for writing from Blighty, here.

2. Please send your work within the text of your email message (we won’t open attachments in this day and age), along with a one-line biography. We’ll link to your own webpage if you want.

3. The word limit is 800 words or fewer. Even shorter works are often even better – that’s the heart of The Pygmy Giant.

4. Please send no more than THREE pieces of work per email. Otherwise it will take ages to get back to you and everybody else. You can always send some more along another time.

5. We’ll accept flash fiction, flash non-fiction, poetry, free verse, rhyming prose… whatever. See below for our preferred tastes.

6. If it’s vulgar, racist, blasphemous or unecessarily lewd, we’re not gonna publish it.

7. There are no set topics unless we say so.

8. If it’s been published anywhere before, please don’t send it, we don’t want to get into copyright trouble. The Pygmy Giant will not itself claim copyright of your pieces (we are not paying you, after all), but if we publish one of your pieces and it later gets published somewhere else, it would be nice if you would add a footnote saying ‘first published in The Pygmy Giant‘, or some such. Our web address would be lovely too. Thanks.

9. Leaving comments. Part of the reason The Pygmy Giant has been set up as a blog is so that readers can easily comment and give feedback or contructive criticism on each piece. Note the word constructive. Don’t slam anything unless you have a suggestion about how to improve it! Let’s maintain some good manners.

What we like

TPG started life as a bit of a free-for-all for unpublished UK writers. We very much still want to foster exciting new UK writers and showcase their work. Over the years, though, long-time readers will have noticed a Pygmy Giant-ish feel develop to the work we tend to publish here. Feel free to send us anything, though, if you think it’s good!

Fiction/non-fiction

We veer towards literary fiction and away from genre fiction. We like all sorts of styles, from borderline-poetry to just dialogue.

We love flash fiction (and non-fiction) to pack a punch, to use a tight word limit wisely, and to leave us feeling some sort of emotion. Surprise, laughter, shock, sadness, or ‘oooooooh that’s clever’.

Stuff set in the UK or with a healthy dose of irony also appeal to our patriotic pages.

Poetry

Our approach to poetry is this: poetry to be read online needs to be able to be enjoyed instantaneously. It is not going to be studied for hours until the layers of meaning are finally extracted. For this reason, we like poetry whose form is perhaps simple, but whose meaning is deep, striking or amusing. To get a better idea of what we mean, please have a browse of the ‘poetry’ category.