Considered "Published" ?

by Vidhi Bagadia
28th July 2014

I just want to try my luck at some poetry I had written months ago. I have already submitted some for the school magazine - which is of course, this local-school journal.

I want to submit one/two of those poems to a competition (again, which have the rule that those should not have been published anywhere before). So, I was just wondering if being published in the school magazine can actually be considered as "published" for the usual completions?

Could be a silly question but thank you :)

Replies

If the work has been published in print/online somewhere, even a school magazine, then I would assume that you cannot submit it for a competition elsewhere.

One way to approach this is to imagine that you had entered the competition and not been accepted only to later discover that one of the winning entries was a published work you had read somewhere before. Would it matter if it was a school magazine or a literary journal? The submitter still bent the rules to enter. Published means exactly that - published.

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