ANER WELTEN
OPEN CALL:
KNIGHTS

Knights in popular culture are as common as insects in open fields.

Think about some of your favourite fantasy series. Even if the characters are not labelled as knights necessarily, they still harbour eerie resemblance to Arthurian heroes – stories that have been told for centuries. Dragons illustrate covers of fantasy books, creative renditions of medieval armour decorate video game figures, and knightly virtues make for round characters with ambitions and flaws.

What we want for this rendition of the Aner Welten Anthology is not retellings of Arthurian epics, however. We want you to challenge the notion of a knight, position it into a unique, weird, fantastical, and surreal setting. We want knights whose virtues lead them to unknown paths, who challenge the institution that is their court and king. We want knights whose moral compass is confronted or breaks or prevails under the direst circumstances. We want talking foxes and giants and nefarious forests and mythical creatures and flying swords and sentient armour and Kafkaesque quests. Ask yourself: What if a knight’s virtue is not friendship, generosity, chastity, courtesy, and piety? What if your knight has seen his own god die or fell in love with them? What if your knight, so full of pride and belonging, gets utterly broken by his own alliance? What if your knight’s main virtue is…love? Or hate? Or melancholia?

This does not mean that the protagonist of your story has to be a knight. What we wish for is for knights to be included. Similarly, we are not setting boundaries in regard to genre: it can be a sci-fi story for all we care; if the story and concept and prose works, it works. However, we do not want alternative history or gory horror, and also possibly avoid using existing knights. Go hog-wild on character creation. Also, if you use a medieval setting, the same rules as on the main submission page reign: no unnecessary gore, killing, sadistic violence and so on – be mindful, do not use your setting as an excuse for strange power fantasies…

We also have curated a list of works that can be used as inspiration, please have a look:

We are looking for 8 stories. They should be short stories with a maximum of 3000 words, and should be written in English, German, French, or Luxembourgish. The submission is open for people either from Luxembourg or living in Luxembourg, and should be at least the age of 18.

We also accept Poems (up to two poems per person).

The accepted stories will receive a payment of 70 euros (budget is tight, sorry! But we want to be as transparent as possible), as well as two copies of the anthology. The stories will be printed and published online on the website. Additionally, the story will be edited in correspondence with the author, of course.

The submission deadline is the 15th of May 2025. The zine will be published at the end of the year. The jury are the Aner Welten Team: Sandy Heep and Cosimo Suglia.

Please follow the formatting rules on our website. You can find them here.

Ready to submit? Send an e-mail with your submission following the formatting rules on our website at: knight@anerwelten.lu