Clean Vs Green Short Story Competition with a Prize of £500

The Green Stories Short Story Competition clean vs green is now accepting entries. Often when promoting waste reduction and reduction of high-energy activities, such as running hot water, we come up against health and safety issues. Some of these are valid, but many are misinformed.

This is a targeted competition aimed at using an engaging fictional story to help readers understand how over-cleaning and misinformation about bacteria can mean that we can end up killing our bodies ‘good’ bacteria through over-use of harsh cleaning products.

Your challenge is to write a short story (between 1000 and 3000 words) that helps to raise awareness and shift attitudes, especially for those people who assume that the more detergent the better.

• Money: £500 (or local currency equivalent)
• Exposure: We will share details of winner on our website and via social media

1. Entry Fee: Free
2. Eligibility: Open to all – we encourage international writers. All submissions must be in English and unpublished.
3. Length: We ask for a short story of between 1000 and 3000 words.
4. You must be over 18.
5. Your entry must be in English and unpublished.
6. Your entry must promote eco-friendly cleaning practices (directly or indirectly) or address misinformation about bacteria and cleaning.
7. Your entry is between 1000 and 3000 words, includes about 200 words on your thinking behind your approach and how your story meets the criteria. Submit as one pdf/word document.
8. The title of the document is the title of the story.

Story Ideas:

• Lockdown story.
• Couple’s therapy.
• War tale.
• Capitalism vs waste.
• The man who gave up showering.
• For more details on each idea check this page.

Judging criteria:

Entries will be judged on the following criteria:

1. Well written, engaging story between 1000 and 3000 words
2. Promotes eco-friendly cleaning practices (directly or indirectly) or addresses misinformation about bacteria and cleaning.

It does NOT have to have an explicitly green theme, or promote eco-friendly cleaning practices directly – it is okay to be more subtle. Not every story needs to address every issue. It’s fine to have a love story, family drama or crime story as the main plot and the cleaning/bacterial aspect as a sub-plot, so it is engaging to mainstream readers but undermines some misinformed beliefs as well.

About Green Stories:

Green Stories is a platform for writing stories on a green and sustainable society. It offers writing competitions for all genres/formats and with various deadlines.

See more available fellowships on For9a

See more opportunities in Canada available on For9a