Formats: short fiction and creative non-fiction (2,500-3,000 words) and graphic fiction (including comics, textile art, collage art, and or visual narratives of 5-10 pages).

Submission Deadline: 15 November 2026 11:59 p.m. (BST).

About This Call

Tales We Were Told is a forthcoming open access edited collection of creative works on oral storytelling, remembrance, and inherited narratives. 

This project aims to collect works of graphic fiction, fiction and creative non-fiction that tell a story that is passed between retellings, re-storying and remembrance across generations, celebrating how oral tales endure, are lost, and survive changed or unchanged in the 21st century. Contributors are encouraged to reflect on storytelling as both an act of preservation and one of reinvention, attending to memory, myth, voice, and erasure.

Submissions are welcome from doctoral researchers currently enrolled in a PhD or equivalent programme, early career and independent creative writers/artists, particularly those who engage in research, community practice, or oral history. A diversity of submissions from writers and communities are encouraged and there is no nationality or geographical restriction.

Themes

Submissions may engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Folktales retold, subverted, or questioned
• Myths (alternate, new, debunked, or defiantly alive)
• Family stories that shift every time they are told
• Intergenerational memories (the ones that travel and the ones that stay behind)
• Everyday anecdotes and the absurd, untranslatable idioms of a community
• Baseless beliefs that turned out to be true or beliefs that weren’t baseless at all
• Stories that were overwritten, erased, or forgotten, and the act of returning to them

Contribution Types

Please submit one piece only in any of the following forms:

1. Short Fiction (2500 - 3000 words)
2. Creative Non-fiction (2500 - 3000 words)
3. Graphic Fiction (for example, comics, textile art narrative, collage art, and/or any sequential visual narrative): 5 - 10 pages only

File formats accepted: .doc, .docx, or .pdf 

We are currently unable to accept more forms than the ones mentioned above. 

Key Dates

Submission Deadline: 15 Novemeber 2026, 11:59 PM (UK time)

Reading Period: 16 November 2026 - 30 January 2027

Notification of Results: by first week of Febraury 2027

Anticipated Publication: 2027

Peer Review and Editorial Process

All submissions will be subject to:

• Initial editorial assessment on submission to ensure fit with the call
• Single-anonymised review by a seven-member editorial team. Contributors’ identities will be withheld during review, and each submission will be independently assessed before collective deliberation
• Peer review of the final manuscript as part of publishing the edited collection

Funding and Publication

This project is funded by the AHRC South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SWWDTP2) and will be published by the University of Southampton Press (UoS Press) with an assigned ISBN and DOI.

Announcement Link: https://library.soton.ac.uk/universitypress/news

The collection will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Under this licence, readers are free to share and adapt the work, including for commercial purposes, provided appropriate credit is given and any changes are indicated.

How to Submit

Submissions are accepted only via the online form linked below. Submissions sent by email will not be considered.

Submit here →https://forms.gle/skWuMpyiNeGtwpWx9

Please ensure that your submission meets all eligibility, formatting, and originality requirements before submitting. By completing the form, you confirm that you have read and understood this call.

Please read the complete call for submissions here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fxLIk5MGk_VrBH0uKlGqxOqv4WpRnzEn/view?u...

Contact

For queries, please email: swwdtp.tales@gmail.com