Inkerman & Blunt continues the search for words infused with love and tenderness.

Australian Love Stories 2014, ed. Cate Kennedy is Now Open for Submissions

In the wake of the huge success of Australian Love Poems 2013, ed. Mark Tredinnick, Inkerman & Blunt Publishers has decided to create a trilogy of Australian love.

We want to explore love through the written word in all its versatility. Australian Love Stories 2014, edited by award winning author Cate Kennedy, will be proof that prose, as well as poetry, is capable of delving into the rawest truths and secrets about passion, infatuation and sensuality.

Editor Cate Kennedy is searching for stories that explore all aspects of amatory love: the dark and the light of it; the holy mess of it; the beginning and the end; the ferocity and tenderness; the way it unmakes us, as we make it; the emptiness it leaves when it leaves.

Cate Kennedy’s first short story collection Dark Roots was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her short stories have twice received The Age short fiction prize, and have appeared in a number of publications including The New Yorker and her most recent short story collection, Like a House on Fire (Scribe 2013) recently won the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards.

If you have a love story check out the submission guidelines. Remember, submissions must be unpublished, your own work, and submitted as a hard-copy postmarked 28 February 2014.