T Paulo Urcanse was a Portuguese writer and activist, most famous for his short novel The Pucker Fish, which won him the acclaim of egghead academic types and ruff and tumble dropout members of the urban intelligentsia secretly living off the generational wealth of their parents but dressed in the uniform of a late 19th Century cobbler and/or coal miner.
In a 1997 interview with the popular American television host, Montel Williams, T Paulo Urcanse said (via translator), “The point of writing is not free expression, or thought analysis through careful cataloging of tangential subject matter, but rather that one day, and God may it be soon, you write a bestseller and make lots and lots of money.”
Over the course of his lifetime, T Paulo submitted his short fiction and poems to over 187 contests, with submission fees totaling in the quadruple digits, US$. Unfortunately, he never won. Not once.
A couple of years ago, The Editors of High Horse began the process of rectifying the great financial injustices rendered upon T Paulo by global markets and sports fans and viewers of The Bachelorette everywhere, by announcing the First Annual T Paulo Urcanse Prize For Literary Excellence, giving away $500 in prize money to five very talented writers. In the process, we were fortunate enough to read through over 300 submissions from people no doubt as incredulous as we are about the lack of public acknowledgement by the academy for the utter genius that was T Paulo Urcanse’s writing.
In the spirit of continuity and finishing what you started, by Jove, it is with great ceremony and pleasure that we formally announce the Third Annual T Paulo Urcanse Prize For Literary Excellence.
The Third Annual T Paulo Urcanse Prize for Literary Excellence is open to poets, writers, and essayists of all colors and stripes. Whether you be a lonely writer looking for community and wanting to make your literary debut, or a similarly eggheaded and celebrated writer in the vein of the namesake of this prize, we welcome your submissions with open arms, without fees or prerequisites, without ever having known you or met you at a cocktail party where we discussed the terror of contemporary history and post-structuralist theory or the pitfalls of the first person perspective in a short story or weird childhood stories that involve stray cats and the throwing of tennis balls at moving vehicles from behind bushes at night in the summer on the Main Street of the provincial town where we were raised.
AND NOW FOR AN ELUCIDATION OF THE MONETARY PRIZES
1st Place: $250, publication on the website, and an optional interview with the Editors.
2nd Place: $100, publication on the website.
3rd-5th Place: $50, publication on the website.
Submissions are open from now (October 8th, 2025 AD) until October 31st, 2025 AD.
You may email your contest submission as a PDF, Word Doc, or Google Doc to therealhighhorse@gmail.com, again, without a fee. Please put (Contest Submission) in the subject line of your message.
Winners will be announced several weeks after the submission deadline on this very website, and elsewhere probably (i.e. X, Instagram, etc.).
All blessings,
The Editors
Past Winners
2024
1st Place: Still Life of an Iris in Spring – to Fitchburg, Wisconsin; & The Odyssey
By Ouristoprous
2nd Place: The Singleton
By A.J. Brown
3rd Place: Facial
By Henry Luzzatto
4th Place: Names for Things
By Amber Burke
5th Place: Clarence Go Boom
By Roger Ellis
2025
1st Place: Scorpion Season
By Lee Tyler Williams
2nd Place: Holyfields + Dangerfields
By Niles Baldwin
3rd Place: Watermelon Rhapsody
By Norie Suzuki
4th Place: The Solar Salon
By Janna De Graaf
5th Place: The Devil and the Mirror
By Joachim Glage
High Horse 