Our apologies for the unexpected inconvenience! 

Unfortunately,The Malahat Review is unable to receive any submissions until 1 June 2025.

Regular submissions (Canadian only) will reopen on 1 June 2025, as will submissions for the current contest (Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize) and Inhale/Exhale: Contemporary Indigenous Storytelling. The submission deadline for Inhale/Exhale has been extended to mid-June.

Welcome!

The Malahat Review acknowledges and respects the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples  on whose territory the University of Victoria stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

The Editorial Boards welcome submissions in English of previously unpublished works of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as translations in any of these three genres, by new, emerging, and established writers from Canada and abroad.

The Editorial Boards are pleased to receive submissions from all writers who wish to send their work for consideration and particularly welcome submissions from those writers who for reasons of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, geography, class, culture, or religion have been historically under-represented in Canadian literary contexts.

Although The Malahat Review publishes current work by contemporary writers, the Editorial Boards will consider translations of work by past writers who are unknown or little known in the English-speaking world and may therefore be of interest to contemporary readers. For all translation submissions, please include a copy of the original text and, for work still under copyright, a copy of a letter of permission from the original author and/or first-language publisher. The same limits and rules apply to translation submissions as to other submissions.

The best way to know what kinds of work we might publish is to order a print or digital issue or to subscribe.

Reading periods

• Submissions from Canadian writers are accepted for consideration from January to June each year. 
• Submissions from international (including US) writers are accepted during the following two months: January and May.
• We also run four contests per year, all of them open to Canadian and international writers alike, and these contests have their own separate guidelines. See below for the currently open contest or for further information go to our contests page.

Response time

We try our best to get back to writers as soon as possible. Due to the many submissions we receive, please allow for one to six months for poetry and up to nine months for fiction and creative nonfiction.

Submitting

Please scroll to the bottom of this page to find the appropriate button for each genre and current contest. We ask that you submit your work in a single .doc, .docx, or .pdf file, and list at the beginning of each piece the word count (for prose) or line count (for poetry). For regular submissions, please ensure that your name and contact info appear on the first page.

Cover letter

Ensure the name, mailing address, and email linked to your Submittable account are up to date. If any of this info differs, you can leave a note in the cover letter section. Please list the title(s) of the work submitted and include a short bio note.

Once per calendar year (per genre, contests excepted)

Excluding any of our contests and theme issues, we ask that writers submit only once per genre (poetry, fiction, cnf, translations) in each calendar year. Contest submissions are unlimited, provided you pay the contest fee(s).

Previous publication

We don’t publish any work that has previously been published, whether in print or online, even if the print run or online audience was small. No work that has been excerpted elsewhere is eligible for submission, nor is any work that has been revised since its original publication.

Simultaneous submissions

For regular submissions, please inform us if you’re making a simultaneous submission, and please update us as soon as possible with any changes to the status of your submission.For contests, we do not accept work simultaneously submitted for consideration elsewhere.

AI?

The magazine’s Editorial Boards are not interested in AI-generated work as such (e.g., machine-written work generated by a prompt). Given the increasing cultural presence and uses of AI, submitters will be asked in Submittable whether AI has been used in the creation of the work being submitted and, if the answer is yes, to explain the extent and nature of its use and what artistic ends it is meant to serve.

Payment & copyright

We pay CAD$70 per published page plus a one-year print subscription and two copies of the issue in which your work appears. (Contest winners receive a cash prize instead of a per-page payment.) We purchase first world serial print and digital rights for publication in English; copyright remains with the author.