Vox9 Short Story Awards · 2026
A short story competition for stories written to be heard. Every entry is judged blind, human and AI writing are both welcome and judged side by side, and every entrant gets free AI narration to turn their story into audio. No entry fee, ever.
Nothing here is final, and that is the point of this page. We want to know how many writers and judges are actually interested before we set the prize money, lock the categories and open entries. Tell us what you'd enter and we'll build it around that.
Roughly 500 to 4,000 words. Something new, or something you have already published on Vox9. Two entries per person at most, and they must be in different categories. No erotica or 18+ entries: dark, violent and frightening are all fine, sexual content is not.
Every entrant gets a free allowance of AI narration to produce their entry, issued once your story is submitted rather than when you register. You pick from a short list of Competition voices, and recording quality is not judged, so nobody gains by hiring a narrator. It covers narrating your story once: if you rewrite it, or something comes out wrong, ask us and we'll run it again. Prefer your own voice? Upload a human-narrated recording instead.
No names, no follower counts, no play counts, and no indication of whether a story was written by a human or with AI. Judges score the story, not the author.
Alongside the judged awards there's a Listener's Choice, voted on by people who have actually listened to the shortlist.
Every category carries the same prizes, so a Horror entry is worth exactly what a Science Fiction entry is worth. On top of that there are two platform-wide awards. Amounts are what we are planning, not yet a promise, which is what this page exists to firm up.
Five to start. If a category doesn't draw enough entries we'll drop it before announcing rather than run it thin, so tell us which one you'd write for. If yours isn't here, say so on the form and we'll count it. You may enter at most two categories, with a different story in each, and you can win only one category prize.
Including HFY. The biggest readership on Vox9 by a distance.
High, low, portal, progression. Dragons optional.
The genre audio was made for. Bring something that works in the dark.
Mystery, heist, noir, procedural. Tension over gore.
Literary, comedy, romance, historical. Anything that doesn't fit the other four.
Vox9 is an AI narration platform, so pretending we have a problem with AI would be absurd. Human-written and AI-assisted stories compete together and judges cannot tell which is which until scoring is finished and locked.
You'll be asked to say honestly how your story was made. We publish that after judging, not before, because we genuinely want to know whether it makes any difference to how a story lands. Nobody has good data on that. This is a chance to get some.
Judges hear entries with every identifying detail stripped out, score against a published rubric and get credited in the results. You don't need to be a Vox9 author, or a Vox9 member at all.
It is real work. Expect to listen to somewhere between 20 and 30 short stories over a few weeks and score each one properly. That is why it is paid: up to £250 per judge, scaled to how many entries you take on and agreed with you before judging starts.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, pick "Be a judge" below and tell us a couple of sentences about yourself. We would rather have six judges who finish than twenty who start.
No account needed and no commitment. We'll email you once when entries open, and nothing else.
We'll email you once, when entries open. Nothing before that.
We only email once. For everything between now and then, follow @vox9studios on Instagram.
Have a listen while you wait →Prize amounts, exact word limits, closing dates and the final category list are not yet confirmed and may change. Registering places you under no obligation to enter. Full terms of entry are published, including what rights you keep (all of them) and how prizes are paid. Questions about eligibility, rights or anything else: awards@vox9.io.