uHlanga is excited to announce a new submissions period in February 2025 for original collections of poetry from South African poets, or poets living in South Africa.
Submissions will be open from 1 February 2025 to 28 February 2025.
We accept submissions from writers of any experience, whether they have previously published a collection of poetry or not.
Every submission will be read by at least one member of our team of readers. Our readers are highly skilled poetry practitioners.
Submissions must be predominantly written in English or isiXhosa. Poems in other languages may be included in your manuscript, but the majority of the poems should be in either of those languages.
There is no prescribed length for submissions. Most books published by uHlanga contain 20-40 poems, but there are exceptions.
uHlanga publishes collections of poetry that have substance and structure. Be ambitious about what you write about, but also please remember to keep your submission coherent. Do not simply include every poem you have ever written.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Writers should be either a citizen, national, or permanent resident of South Africa. (Refugees and asylum seekers currently in South Africa are also eligible.)
Submissions will only be accepted through our email address – submissions@uhlangapress.co.za. Your submission should take the form of two attachments: 1) your poems, all compiled in a single .doc or .pdf attachment; and 2) a cover letter, which includes your name and contact information. (We will add your email address to our mailing list. Please let us know if you would not like to be added to our mailing list. You can unsubscribe at any time.)
Please set all text in Times New Roman, unless your poems require special formatting. (This applies to works of concrete poetry, image poetry, etc.)
Collaborative submissions are accepted, but please note that anthologies or retrospective collections – i.e. collections composed solely of poems published previously in other single-author collections – will not be accepted.
Manuscripts containing poems previously published in magazines, anthologies, journals, or online will be accepted, as long as each previously published poem is acknowledged in the manuscript. Submissions that have already been published – including self-published books – will not be accepted.
We strongly discourage the use of generative AI to compose your poems. Please notify us in your cover letter if you have used AI in your work.
Please note that due to the amount of submissions we receive, we generally cannot give feedback on individual unsuccessful submissions.
Successful writers will be offered our standard contract. Please note that this is not a competition: we reserve the right to publish none of the manuscripts received during this submissions period. In order to ensure that every submission is treated appropriately, we also reserve the right to respond to submissions in our own time. Most submissions are evaluated within six months.
There is no reading fee.
Do not submit your manuscript before 1 February 2025 or after 28 February 2025 – it will be discarded without being read.
Good luck!