Submissions

July 2025 OPEN CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS

We will be accepting manuscripts from all of Australia and Asia Pacific again from July 1-7, 2025 (closes midnight AEST). We are looking for collections of short stories, essays, novellas, novels and poetry. We are always interested in works in translation from Asia Pacific.

We are looking for poetry collections of up to 100pp and prose works up to 350pp. 

In addition, we are hoping to restart the deciBels series of chapbooks ...

deciBels series: In 2025, we are hoping to restart our deciBels series with a set of 10 chapbooks by poets in Victoria. Bella Li and LK Holt have agreed to join as contributing editors and contributors. All poetry manuscripts by Victorian writers submitted to the July 2025 open call will be considered for inclusion in the fourth release from the deciBels series. Please note for the deciBels series #4: (a) poets must be from/based in Victoria, Australia (b) manuscripts can be 16pp-50pp A5 pages long. 

Please let us know if the manuscript has been previously submitted to other publishers.



To submit your manuscript for a full-length collection or prose work or inclusion in the deciBels series, we will need the following in a single PDF:


1. Cover letter – providing (a) the author’s contact details (including legal name if writing under a pen name); (b) author bio and publishing history; (c) a brief synopsis of the work.

2. The manuscript – remember to include a table of contents, list of acknowledgments of work in the manuscript previously published elsewhere and sources of any copyrighted material used (epigraphs, cut-ups, collages etc).


Please save and send the above as a single PDF using your family name + the title of the manuscript + the genre as the file name. (For example, ‘Thomas_ExhibitionText_novel.pdf’,‘Holt_Capacity_poetry.pdf’).



Due to limited resources and funding, we are only able to publish a small fraction of the manuscripts we receive each year and will only be able to respond in detail to submissions we hope to publish.



Please send submissions to <submissions[at]vagabondpress[dot]net>. Submissions won't be accepted outside the open call dates noted above.
 

Creative Partnerships

We remain interested in forming a partnership with university-based creative writing schools wanting to develop and fund new works or a new list of works of poetry, prose and translations stemming from their faculty and program. If you run a program and have funding to support a list of work produced by students or faculty, please get in touch.