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.
Featured image and gallery: Lucy Elson-Whittaker Fcukers headline a sold-out show at Manchester’s New Century Hall, in support of their long-awaited debut album, ‘ö’. Opening the night are Sydney-based Sleepazoid, whose hazy, atmospheric sound offers a sharp contrast to the headliners’ explosive energy. Their set feels cinematic and dream-like, serving as both a striking opener…
Featured image and gallery: Sub Khan Hailing from Manchester and playing a sold-out show at Manchester’s Lion’s Den, with an imminent EP on the way, aAh! speaks to Fred Farrell (vocals) and Danny Atherton (bass) of Dr Dr. Did you start the band during Covid times? Is that where it all originated? F: It was…
Featured image: Gary Walker Neo-blues soul artist Yellow Days, the stage name of Haslemere’s George van den Broek, returns to Manchester with his seventh album, Rock And A Hard Place, and a live show that proves just how far he has come. Before he steps out, London-based act Brian Nasty warms the room up nicely,…
Featured image and gallery: Sally Stretch The Royston Club perform alongside Overpass and Permanent (Joy) at a sold-out O2 Victoria Warehouse. Welsh indie rock band The Royston Club, school friends who began playing together in 2017, now headline O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester. Touring second album Songs For The Spine, they generate an energetic sold-out…
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