Ink & Iron Fist Spring 2026 Short Story Contest Results + Upcoming Writing Events
The Ink & Iron Fist Spring 2026 Short Story Contest is officially over, and it was a roaring success!
Our first ever quarterly short story contest has now come to a close, and we could not be happier with how it went.
We had 14 fantastic stories, tons of engagement, and loads of thoughtful, encouraging, and genuinely useful feedback from contestants and readers alike. Every story was posted anonymously and voted on anonymously, keeping the focus exactly where it should be: on the writing.
We had one first-place winner and two runner-up stories, and you can read the winning entries from our Spring 2026 contest here:
https://www.inkandironwriters.com/the-winners-archive
A huge thank you to everyone who entered, read, voted, commented, critiqued, encouraged, and helped make this first contest such a brilliant event.
Our next quarterly short story contest, the Summer 2026 Ink & Iron Fist Short Story Contest, will officially begin on July 3rd, 2026, and we would love to welcome even more writers this time around.
In the meantime, we have a couple of other writing events coming up.
From May 12th to May 21st, we’ll be running our Blurbatory Event.
Have you written something? Are you now trying to describe that whole something in a few paragraphs in a way that makes it sound good? You are in Blurbatory.
Join this event for a fun, low-stakes mini-competition designed to help each other sharpen our self-promotion abilities. No need to have written a book to join.
More info on Blurbatory can be found on our Discord:
After that, we’ll be launching our month-long Novel Writers’ Sprint. Sign-ups open on May 21st and run through to June 29th. This is a focused writing sprint designed to help writers show up consistently, build word count, and make real progress on a novel-length project.
We’ll also be using a specially created platform to log daily word counts and turn that progress into a classic dungeon-crawler adventure, complete with individual goals, party goals, and title rewards earned along the way.
You can find more information about our upcoming events and contest timeline here:
https://www.inkandironwriters.com/contest-timeline
Thanks again to everyone who helped make our first short story contest such a success. We hope to see even more writers, readers, and feedback-goblins join us for the summer round.