Dissident Art Contest

About Passage Prize

Passage Prize is a literature and arts contest open to anyone reading this. There is a $10,000 $15,000 prize pool that will be awarded to winning entries in the categories of Fiction, Poetry, Visual Art, and Literary Non-Fiction. Winning submissions will be collected in a physical and digital volume, to be published by Passage Press in partnership with Canonic. Entrants are encouraged to review the guidelines and prize details before submitting, as well as the editor’s note below.

Passage Prize is currently accepting donations to help fund the endeavor. To donate Bitcoin, Ethereum, or USDC please select the appropriate QR code below.

If you wish to contribute funds in some other way, please contact editor@passageprize.com.

Dear Reader,

We live in an age of profound cultural rot. There is a stench of dying all around us. There is no life here. What passes for literature, film, drama, poetry, art of all kinds, is bloodless and barren, the agitprop for a regime of shrill Human Resource mediocrities.

It is FAKE and GAY.

Go read the novels short-listed for the big prizes. Whatever of poetry still even exists. The undifferentiated fare at your local theater. If your spirit has not been reduced already to zero, to NOTHING——and if you are reading this it must not be the case——what you will find will burn your eyes. You will feel like your veins have been scraped out with a rusted spoon.

Whereas art is meant to inspire and edify, this culture is meant to demoralize. It is meant to turn you against yourself, to debase you into submission, to condition you to the pod. Enough!

We do not have to accept this. Outside this longhouse of putrid moralism, a frontier awaits us, a new virgin territory. There are worlds yet to be discovered. Ways of being that do not reduce us to a state of meek, unrelenting surrender. There are portals. Enormous and powerful energies latent in the graves of pre-history, waiting for a hand, a mind, an imagination to retrieve and transform them into the creative spirit that will light a new way forward. It has always been thus, and will be again.

We must EXIT FROM THE LONGHOUSE. We must seek, together, mutations and new possibilities. We must demonstrate through art, through story, through symbol and invention, what it means to leave this rotten place behind, to give life to a language and a temperament that is not afraid, that will not passively abide the cruel and craven bugmen who presume to rule us.

This is a calling that transcends any partisan sniping, any lowly ideological pissing contest. Let us raise ourselves and each other above such things. Let us imagine a passage from this place to another one. Let us stake out the path. Let us dream it into existence. Join me. The only way out is through.

-L0m3z

• Open October 12 to January 1, 2022
• Submissions are open to all writers——anons and real-name authors alike
• Previously unpublished work only——if you try to sneak a published piece of writing past us, either by you or someone else, we will publicly out you as a fraud and a liar
• We allow one submission per category per person—if you spam us with multiple submissions in the same category we will disregard all of them
• All entries will be considered for publication in the collected volume
• Do not rush your submission. Once it is submitted you will not be allowed to edit or change anything, or resubmit something else.
• All submissions must be made via our website (please do not email anyone your submissions directly. Use the form.)
• Submissions will be read and shortlisted by the Passage Prize editor, and winning entries will then be selected by the category judges
• All submission will be anonymized and evaluated by the judges without knowledge of the author

FICTION

• Winners will be selected by Zero HP Lovecraft
• We will consider short stories or novel excerpts totaling no more than 10K words
• Writers are encouraged to submit their very best work, regardless of genre or topic, and are not beholden to any formal or stylistic constraints

POETRY

• Winners will be selected by Curtis Yarvin
• We will consider single poems, or up to 3 poems totaling no more than 10 pages, single spaced, 12 point font
• To write good poetry you must risk being cringe; but don’t be cringe

VISUAL ART

• Winners will be selected by Gio Pennacchietti
• We will be devoting 9 pages of the collected volume to visual art
• 3 winners will be chosen in this category, with 3 pages devoted to the submission of each winner.
• Submissions in this category should show us what your 3 pages would look like
• Submissions can be done in any genre or medium (so long as it can be printed)
• Pages can be stylistically distinct, or part of a coherent series. It’s up to you.
• In short, send us 3 of your best examples of visual art.

LITERARY NON-FICTION

• Judge TBD
• We will consider essays and narrative non-fiction totaling no more than 10k words
• We will consider everything that comes our way, but encourage you to avoid the usual fare of political/philosophical/social commentary that is so prominent elsewhere
• Tell us a story, of a person, of a place, of you, of a thing in the world

FINE PRINT via the highly knowledgable——may Allah forgive me for uttering this word——lawyers at Legal Zoom: Winning submissions will be published and sold in a collected volume through Canonic and Passage Press LLC. Passage Press LLC will retain a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license over all winning work and retains the right to sell this work. Authors and artists retain the right to simultaneously sell and publish their submitted work, but will not be entitled to royalties made from the sale of the collected volume.

Donations to Passage Prize will be used to fund the prize pool, pay vendors, and reimburse the editors for their time and work. Excess donations will be used to fund subsequent volumes.