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Thank you for your interest in contributing to The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM). We are now CLOSED for submissions.

Our forthcoming issue (No. 54): April 15, 2023.

Submission period for Issue 55 (August Issue): April 16, 2023 — May 31, 2023.
NOTE: The Submissions Form will be made available once we are open for submissions.

We publish three times a year: April, August and December, respectively. We publish fiction, poetry, and graphic fiction. You are welcome to send us translations, but please indicate clearly on your manuscript that it is a translation. We also publish essays, reviews and interviews, but currently we do so on a commissioned basis.

Payment: We pay an honorarium of Rs. 5,000 (approx. $65) per contribution.

Submission Guidelines

We learn a submission is incomplete only quite late in the process. It’s usually too late to do anything at that point. So please check that you meet the following guidelines. In other words, please check you meet the following guidelines.

  • Please send us just one previously unpublished submission. We consider personal blogs as publications. Also if you send us multiple submissions (that is, more than one story or one set of five poems) we will only consider your last submission.
  • Please make sure to include your name and email address in the document itself.
  • Cover letters are optional, and we always read the other material first. But we do like to learn about our authors.
  • Fiction submissions: submit one short story between 2,000-7,000 words. Regrettably, we do not publish flash fiction, novellas, or novels.
  • Poetry submissions: please submit five poems, all in one document. We usually select three to four poems per contributor. Please do not send us fewer than five poems— we wish to understand your range and style through a substantial sample. We are publishing a poet, not a poem.
  • You may send your work to other outlets (i.e. we are fine with simultaneous submissions). However, please inform us if your work has been selected elsewhere. We remember such acts of courtesy. Also, if one or more poems from your submission are accepted for publication elsewhere, then we’ll mark your whole submission as withdrawn.
FAQs (Please read ’em)

Sorry, please don’t. We don’t accept submissions in multiple categories. If you do, we will send you a nice email asking you to pick one submission. But it really adds to our administrative workload, so please help us out here.

We do publish in these genres, but at the moment we are only commissioning essays, reviews and interviews.

Regrettably, no. TBLM is an English-language based literary magazine.

No, we don’t. However, TBLM does publish genre fiction and poetry. We’re mindful of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s observation that a division of labor quickly becomes a division of labourers. We see genre as a useful division of literary works, not authors.

We follow a ternary publication schedule. We accept submissions during December-January, April-May, and August-September. Our new issues are made available in April, August and December, usually by the fifteenth.

If you’ve published with us earlier (hello, friend!), please wait for a year before sending us something in the same genre.

We rarely get asked this, so strictly speaking this isn’t a FAQ. Just ping us at help@bombaylitmag.com and let us know of the withdrawal. If the reading period is open, feel free to submit something else.

No worries. For this and other existential queries, just ping us at help@bombaylitmag.com. We usually respond within a day.

IP Rights: As writers, we are all-too-aware of how usurious publishing contracts can be. So we worked with Dr. Kalyan Kankanala, chief attorney at Banana IP, India’s leading intellectual-property law firm, to devise generous and equitable terms for the author. We only ask for the minimum set of digital rights that will let us legally display your work online, exclusively for a period of one year, but non-exclusively thereafter. You retain all other rights.