Our Winter 2025-26 issue, which we are due to publish in November, will have a special focus on the climate crisis. Alongside our usual mix of the very best new writing, we want to showcase visionary, provocative, and original new work about the climate and the endangered future of our planet. We also wish to encourage more writers to engage with the consequences of climate change — global warming, biodiversity loss, plastics pollution, extreme weather events, the impact of populist right-wing political agendas on the natural world — and to embed the climate crisis into work that addresses the perennial concerns of writers and readers: love, family, friendship, society, and life in all of its polychrome and complex facets. There will be room in this issue for writing that tackles the climate crisis head-on, for writing that seeks to explore its significance more speculatively or laterally, for pragmatic or enthusiastic solutions-based writing, and for writing that undertakes to examine the apprehension many of us feel when considering our shared future. We wish to reflect the various ways it’s possible to respond to this existential threat: no one narrative is adequate, and writers are encouraged to respond to this theme in whatever way feels true to their experience and concerns.
This is a global crisis, and so we are interested in reading work from international writers, but especially those able to bring into focus details, effects or potential solutions particular to their communities. But, as an Irish literary magazine, we intend this issue to include specific engagement with climate through an Irish lens. How should we interpret the collapse in support for the Green Party in the 2024 General Election? What might we do about Ireland’s likely failure to meet its future carbon budgets? What does biodiversity loss mean for rural communities? What might increasing investment in data centres portend in an insecure economy? Will science provide a way forward? And on a human level — reflecting that need to create and communicate that drives us as writers and readers — how do we navigate it all? How do we make sense of this planet under threat with the skills and resources available to us, with the creativity that adds so much joy and compassion to our understanding of our world, and our place in it.
We are keen to read work from writers who we haven’t published before, as well as work from those writers we have been publishing over the years.
Fiction and poetry engaging with the ‘climate’ theme will be welcomed through our usual Submittable portal, which will open from May 1 to May 15, 2025. The link to the submission form will be available on our main submission guidelines page during that two-week period.
For pieces of creative non-fiction, we are inviting people to submit a pitch in the first instance. We are accepting pitches now – and up until March 31st – via this Submittable form.