Featured image: Suzy Hazelwood
aAh! Magazine’s Literature and Creative Student Editors are delighted to announce our first online call for submissions for the 2025/26 academic year. This series invites creative writing students and visual artists to respond to the theme ‘Hometown’, offering the opportunity to showcase their work online.
Manchester is a hometown for thousands, and simply just another city for others. Wherever your hometown is, the feelings and memories it contains and conjures are universal. There’s nothing like walking down familiar streets, worn with laughter and age, or brushing a hand along initial-carved trees that populate the park. Hometown’s house stories in their millions, and are the beginnings of wonderful tales.
What do you miss about your hometown? Is your hometown a place of comfort, or unease? Are you happy to have left, or desperate to go back? How much influence does your hometown have over who you are today, if any. In a world where ‘hometown’ has such vast political and emotional connotations, what does it mean to you?
Creative Writing Guidelines:
We are accepting works of prose, poetry and flash fiction on the theme of ‘Hometown’ to be considered for online publication. Send us your best, completed works that explore elements of the prompt above. For prose submissions there is a maximum word count of 1,500 words and for poetry, a minimum line count of 10 and a maximum of 30. We allow a maximum of three pieces of poetry per submission and one piece of prose per submission.
To submit, email your submission as a Word document to aAh.Editor@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Creative Submission’. Deadline: Monday 15 December, 2025.
Featured Artists Guidelines:
A spotlight on a visual artist – submit up to ten images and we will pick our favourites to be featured as part of this online series. Fine artists of all practices welcome, illustrators, photographers and graphic designers. Send us a brief bio and explanation of how your work relates to the theme ‘Hometown’ to be considered for online publication.
Artists and designers are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, any mixed media, digital, performance and film (jpg still image and a link to video) etc. All visual art mediums are welcome. Submit your visual work in a digital format in the highest possible resolution you have available – not below 300 dpi.
Visual Guidelines
Our Featured Artists work may also be published online alongside a range of creative prose, poetry, and other artwork which offers a critical, insightful and creative slant on the theme of ‘Hometown’. We are looking for inventive and thought-provoking perspectives to create a magazine that opens conversation and breaks convention.
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