Submissions

This is dull, practical advice on how to submit your work. For advice on what to submit, and ideas about the kinds of writing we like, visit Tips.

The submission window for Issue No. 2 is June 1 – July 13.

It is free to submit to The Little Review, and always will be.

Please read the submission details carefully. If you are planning to submit poems, please pay very close attention to the rule in bold below (‘NB’, in the ‘Poems & Book Reviews’ section).

We welcome simultaneous submissions (i.e. work you have also sent elsewhere). If something you have sent us is accepted by another publication, let us know at your earliest convenience.

There is no need to include a cover letter or biographical note.

The Little Review is a very small magazine (in every sense). We are not currently able to pay for pieces, but each of our writers receives a free one-year subscription to the magazine, beginning with the issue in which their work appears. We hope to begin offering payments to writers in 2026.

If you have questions about anything below, email them to editor@thelittlereview.co.uk with the word QUERY in the subject line.

How to submit by email:

News & Letters

The Little Review publishes letters to the editor, news, opinion, gossip, praise, blame, hate mail, billets-doux, information about forthcoming publications, event listings, Lonely Hearts ads, etc, in our Mailbox pages and our weekly newsletter.

Email any such notes to mailbox@thelittlereview.co.uk. We assume all correspondence is intended for publication, unless the word QUERY appears in the subject line.

Features

Email pieces you have written, or pitches for pieces you might like to write, to editor@thelittlereview.co.uk with the word FEATURES in the subject line.

We are interested in poetry, and in things tangentially related to poetry.

There is no maximum or minimum length for features.

We are very keen to see features about encounters between poetry and other arts. For a detailed guide to the kind of features we publish, see Tips: Features. 

Poems & Book Reviews

The Little Review is open for submissions of poems and reviews for roughly a third of the year, in three six-week windows. We aim to respond within eight weeks of the end of the relevant window.

There is no maximum or minimum length for a poem or a review. A four-word review might be just as appealing as a 4,000-word review, if you’ve found the perfect four words.

That said, we admire and encourage brevity. Poems under 20 lines and reviews under 500 words are especially welcome.

Email poems and reviews to editor@thelittlereview.co.uk with the word SUBMISSION in the subject line.

Attach your work to the email as a Word document (.doc or .docx). If you are concerned about preserving the formatting of a particular poem, please also include a PDF version, in addition to the Word file.

Any review submitted in our June 1 – July 13 window must cover one book published in 2024 or 2025. We review books of poetry, and books that might appeal to people interested in poetry. (For the avoidance of doubt: pamphlets and chapbooks are books – they’re just small books.)

Our reviews section does not include round-ups. If you are interested in writing an article comparing several recent books, we would prefer to publish this as a feature (see Features, above).

Please send only one submission per window. Your submission may include as many pieces as you like, so long as it follows the rule in bold below (see ‘NB’). Each piece within the submission will be considered independently. 

If you are submitting two or more reviews, we would prefer you to include at least one review of a book that you liked, and at one least one review of a book that you disliked, to give a rounded sense of your tastes.

NB: Any submission that includes poems must include at least one book review per poem.

Feel free to include more reviews than poems in your submission, but submissions containing fewer reviews than poems will not be accepted.

Submissions containing only reviews (and no poems) are very welcome.

Submissions containing only poems (and no reviews) will not be read, and may not receive a response.

This rule applies to all submissions, unless we have explicitly stated otherwise.

For more guidance on the kind of poetry we’re looking for and how to review for us, see Tips: Poetry & Tips: Reviews.

How to submit by post:

Postal submissions received after a submission window has closed will be held until the next window. All submissions that include poems must follow the rule in bold above (‘NB’). Our address is:

The Little Review,
56 St Paul’s Terrace,
York, YO24 4BJ