FICTIONS: An anthology centering queer voices in/from/across South Asia

… a language

where yesterday and tomorrow

are the same word. Kal.

Call for Submissions: Until 15 April 2021

For our upcoming fiction anthology, we are looking for writers that build queer utopias through storytelling.

We take as our inspiration Fatimah Asghar’s invocation of the Hindi-Urdu word kal, which signifies both yesterday and tomorrow, and ask contributors to think of the body as a site of memory and of speculation. We look towards our forgotten and imagined queer pasts to carve out possible futures. We look towards our forgotten and imagined queer futures to carve out possible pasts.

Fictions aims to dismantle and challenge normative ways of storytelling. Therefore, we welcome experimental fiction, creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, and forms that confuse genres and boundaries. Whether testimony, memory, myth, dream or fantasy, we encourage work where the real and imagined, future and past overlap and intersect.

Unruly meditations, remembrances, and visions that attend to personal and collective histories, the histories of our names and bodies and lives, the stories that shape us, are welcome. We envision Fictions as a site for South Asian voices to reimagine queerness, and ideas of South Asia, and as a space of connection and belonging.

If it is love, hurt, desire or pleasure; wherever the work stems from, we ask that you share it—we see Fictions as an opportunity to write ourselves into existence, to make each other possible.

Submission Guidelines –

* We invite original and previously unpublished fiction submissions from queer writers in/from/across South Asia.

* Given the realities of what it is to live non-normative identities, works submitted under pseudonyms and anonymously will be accepted.

* Submissions must be between 1500-4000 words.

* We welcome works in the English language as well as English translations of original works. We encourage writers to dismantle the language and do with it what you will, we aren’t looking for anyone’s version of English other than yours.

* Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please let us know if your submission is accepted elsewhere.

* Please provide a biography (max 1 page) and a short summary of how the piece you are submitting is located in your practice.

* All selected contributors will be paid 60.000 LKR/48.000 PKR/250 Euro/300 USD.

* Submissions and inquiries are welcome at hydra@district-berlin-com.

* The deadline for submission ends on 15 April 2021.

DOWNLOAD the call

a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. kal

FICTIONS is the second publication in the series a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. kal. It will be co-edited by Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke, Momina Masood and Aziz Sohail and published by Archive Books & The Many Headed Hydra. “a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. kal” is a trans*oceanic platform for queer futures/pasts and decolonial ecologies that are connected through bodies of water lapping at different shorelines – the Arabian Sea in Karachi, the Indian Ocean in Colombo, the tidal merge of the Atlantic and Shannon river in the West of Ireland, the Pacific in North America and the River Spree in Berlin. Kal is organized by Aziz Sohail and The Many Headed Hydra with Fiza Khatri and Sandev Handy at District Berlin and the houses of kal in Karachi and Colombo. The project title is a line from Fatimah Asghar’s poem “Kal”. The project is supported by the Department for Culture and Europe in the Berlin Senate, the Goethe Institutes Karachi and Colombo and ifa. More information here