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.
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.
In honor of this great and under-compensated monolith of a writer, and in the name of LITERARY EXCELLENCE, the Editors of High Horse are proud to announce the first annual T Paulo Urcanse Prize for Literary Excellence.
The 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 (September 1st, 2023 AD) until October 1st, 2023 AD. Although, who are we kidding, we’ll probably do that thing that all magazines do where they announce a two week extension a week before the deadline.
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 two weeks after the submission deadline on this very website, and our corresponding Twitter (sorry, X), and Instagram pages.
All blessings,
The Editors
High Horse 