Evening Standard's Stories festival and competition returns

The Evening Standard’s What’s Your Story? competition is returning for a second year as part of the newspaper’s Stories Festival. 

This year’s Stories Festival will be held in central London from 22nd to 24th September with sessions from publishing, screen and audio creators. The line up will be revealed over the summer.  

Applications are now open in its competition for anyone with an original story about themselves, who is ready to tell it in “a fresh and compelling way”. This year entries can be written for the screen, the stage or the page. Applicants can tell their story through dialogue, lyrics, poetry or prose, and submissions can be written or performed. Each entry must be either up to 1,000 words or a video of up to two minutes in length.  

Entries close on 24th July. There will be two initial longlisting processes before a shortlist is submitted to a final judging panel. Judges will select one overall winner and two runners up.  
There is no fee to enter and winning pieces will be performed live at the festival and published on at standard.co.uk, as well as a receiving writing advice session with one of the judges. 

This year’s panel will be chaired by author and journalist Lotte Jeffs, and includes Jessica Loveland, head of new writing at the BBC; Deblina Chakrabarty, vice-president of MGM and a founding member of The Whole Kahani, a collective of British fiction writers of South Asian origin; and Andrew Hunter Murray, the scriptwriter and senior researcher for BBC2’s “QI”, who co-hosts the award-winning podcast “No Such Thing As A Fish”. 

Charlotte Ross, acting editor, said: "After the waves created by our first Stories Festival, we at the Evening Standard are excited to be welcoming back our storytelling festival and competition, a major creative collaboration with partner Westfield London. I would encourage anyone who has ever wanted to write or tell their story to enter – we can’t wait to see your work."