Minds Shine Bright acknowledges the Yalukit-Willam clan of the Boon Warring people of the Kulin nations, the Traditional Custodians of the land where we live and work and where this website was made. We pay respects to their long history and culture, and their Elders, past, present and emerging.
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Minds Shine Bright is a publisher and arts business based in Melbourne Australia that supports the arts and writers.
We run writing competitions including Minds Shine Bright Confidence, a longitudinal exploration of the theme confidence in contemporary fiction and poetry, Seasons a competition with a changing external theme and Places.
Minds Shine Bright also runs community writing projects, workshops and literary events that celebrate writers, writing communities, readers and books. We spread the love of anthologies far and wide.
We publish contemporary fiction books of stories, poems and scripts.
The Places Writing Competition Long Lists and Short Lists have been finalised and we are contacting all entrants this week and next week. Please be patient as there will be a short break for Easter during this time. All entrants should receive an email by Friday 10th April.
Winners will be announced at an online Awards Celebration at the end of April.
The Young Illustrators’ Places Competition is now closed. We will be busy over April judging entries to select the art work for the Young Writer’s Anthology. Thanks for submitting.Â
Minds Shine Bright holds one writing competition per year which opens in August and closes in May, alternating between Seasons, Confidence and other themes.
Winners receive cash prizes, books and invitations to read at virtual and live events.
Our new writing competition ‘The Places we Live, Love and Leave’ is  now closed for judging.
Find the terms and conditions  for the Places Writing Competition here.
The Seasons writing competition has a changing theme that relates to the external world, and imagined worlds. This competition has smaller prizes, smaller word limits and focuses on a smaller set of writers. Our first two competitions themes were Storm and Light and Shadow.
The Storm Anthology, featuring the winning and commended entries from the first Seasons writing competition is available now. The Light and Shadow writing competition has now closed, judging is underway and a new Seasons anthology Light and Shadow will be launched in 2025.
Minds Shine Bright Confidence writing competition aims to captures and share how fiction writers explore the theme of confidence over time. There are four categories including short stories, poetry, flash fiction and short scripts. The competition is blind judged, entries are assessed against ten criteria and there are many entries so the judging process takes several months. Once judging is complete there is an online Awards Event and once the anthology is curated, edited and designed and published there is a celebratory launch.
As writers discover and explore different elements and layers of the confidence theme we look forward to seeing how the series of Confidence anthologies evolves and what we can learn from it about our times, trends in contemporary writing and ourselves.
Our next Confidence writing competition will open in August 2026 and close on 31 March 2027
