Submissions for Channel Issue 16 (Spring 2027) are open from 1 to 30 November; see guidelines below. We will also welcome book submissions for the first time later this year.

Submissions to Channel

About Channel

Channel is a biannual literary journal, in publication since 2019, that acts as a home for Irish and international work grounded in ecological entanglement.

Like Channel Press, our journal takes its name from the notion of a channel as always being something that connects – whether referring to a body of water, a band of electromagnetic frequencies or the act of channelling a spirit, the word always points to a conduit through which one thing can flow through or towards another. Channel exists to house work that acts in this same way, drawing human beings and the rest of the living world closer together.

Although we draw inspiration from global nature writing traditions and from the many dedicated platforms for writing on climate and ecology that exist around the world today, the scope of our publishing is not limited by constrictive definitions of nature writing and eco-writing. We are interested in work that speaks directly of a writer’s love and fear for the biosphere, or that challenges the political and cultural conventions behind runaway climate change; equally, though, we believe that work drawing on nature for setting, image or metaphor can carry power to reshape our relationships with the world around us. Historically, all human language and creativity has been shaped by embeddedness in our environment – the kind of work we want to publish is the kind that takes that universal seed of connection and plants it, revelling in how it might grow.

The best way to find out what we love is to read a back issue.

Guidelines

• We can accept submissions to Channel only during our dedicated submissions windows, running from 1–30 November for our spring issue and from 1–31 May for our autumn issue each year. 
• All submissions must be previously unpublished. We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please let us know as soon as possible if your piece is accepted elsewhere. 
• Please send your work by email to submissions@channelpress.ie, with ‘Poetry/Fiction/Non-Fiction Submission for Channel’ in the subject line.  Your submission should be attached as a single Word document or PDF, with no author name or other identifying information in the document itself. You may, if you wish, include a short bio and/or background to the work in the body of your email. 
• We believe that creative work should occupy the space it needs to reach its full potential, and so place no limit on the length of submissions. That said, given the limited space in each issue we’ll only offer a home for a prose piece of over 6000 words or a poem of over 300 lines if we think it’s an especially good fit. 
• Submissions are welcome from anywhere in the world, and can be in English or Irish. Authors of work in Irish accepted for publication may, if they choose, have their work published with an accompanying English translation by our Eagarthóir Gaeilge. 
• We also welcome submissions of work translated into English or Irish. Please note when submitting work in translation that you must be able to obtain rights for our reproduction of your translations as detailed below. Responsibility for clearing permissions for translated work, and for payment of any related fees, lies with the translator, to whom our contributor fee will be paid. 
• We can only consider up to four poems, one story and/or one non-fiction piece from the same author per submissions window. Files containing work beyond these quotas will be deleted unread.
• Work written with the assistance of generative AI is not permitted. 
• We aim to showcase a variety of voices in Channel. For this reason, if your work was published in our last issue we ask that you wait one issue before submitting again.

Payment and Rights

We pay €35 per printed page, with a minimum fee of €60 for single-page works and a maximum fee of €250 per piece. 

When we pay for your work, we are buying the rights to include it in all print and ebook editions of the issue in which it appears, as well as to potentially feature it as archival material on the Channel Press website in future. Short extracts may also be used for promotional purposes on social media. In all cases, copyright remains with the author and you are welcome to republish your work elsewhere after its publication date in Channel. We would be grateful if you mention Channel as the place of first publication.