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.
Feature Image: Press “It’s important to find your people. Don’t feel like you have to find this incredible producer or person who’s going to give you loads of money and change your life” says Lauerence Tratalos, one-half of the Northern duo responsible for Misper; a feature debut for director Harry Sheriff and script writer Tratalos….
Featured image and gallery: Lucy Elson-Whittaker Fuel Café Bar in Withington hosts the fifth stop of six-piece band Ignoring Izzy’s ‘Motorway Musk’ tour, following the release of their debut single. The room buzzes with the promise of chaos, and possibly a few flying vegetables. Opening the night is Manchester-based Leucotome, a witch-folk trio blending soft,…
Featured image and gallery: Sub Khan Opening the night, Gabrielle eases the Co-op Live crowd into the spectacular night ahead. There’s no need for spectacle, her presence alone is enough with her deep vocals echoing around the arena. A performance rooted in control and feeling, each song reveals a different shade of her understated command. Operating…
Featured image and gallery: Sam Holmes Formed in Belfast in 2019, Chalk have already made a name for themselves. From support slots for Fontaines D.C., IDLES and Sprints, to taking to the stage at SXSW earlier this year, the band’s growth has been rapid and shows no signs of stopping. Touring their debut album Crystalpunk,…
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