The Pride Awards

2021 Winners!

Happy Pride Everyone! 

Our team is super excited to share our 2021 winners (after a long chaotic circuit!) with you! But before we can introduce you to our four incredible stories with jaw-dropping plot twists, and much needed Queer representation, we want to thank our amazing judges who despite horrible circumstances managed to come back together again and bring you these stories for the beginning of pride! 

First of all we have our amazing LGBTQ community leader, @Parisable  whose stories focus on casual representation in the Canadian and Iranian horror and fantasy genres. 

Secondly, we have @InkAndWander our guest judge, without whom this award would not be possible. Her poems are tantalizing and focus on demisexuality, heartbreak, and eastern philosophies. We thank you for being a part of our awards.

And lastly, @hottiesoftie our community leader, whose work has some of the best representation we have seen. Thank you for believing in us and creating  a space where queer stories could be shared and appreciated. 

Now, for the fun part! 

Here are our 2021 Pride Award Contest Winners! 

In the fourth place we have "Sincerely, Mysterious"  by @slimmwrites .  This Story is about Adrian Gonzalez, who has a hopeless crush on the nonbinary Parker Thomspon, the school heartthrob with an impeccable fashion sense.  You can follow his story now, as a class group chat intertwines Adrian and Parker's lives, and one impulsive, stupid reply changes the course of both their lives. 

In the third place we have "The Art of Breathing underwater" by DavidEAnderson100 . For bipolar fifteen-year-old Aaron, growing up in '90s Dublin, being gay is a choice. It is a choice between risking alienation from his conservative Catholic family, and close-minded friends, or drowning under the weight of his secrets. So discovering he is falling in love with his witty bi-racial best friend, Robbie, an aspiring actor, plunges Aaron into a sea of confusion. Swimming against the tide of expectations, the young men set a course through sex, drugs, and Bowie concerts, an outlet from a world that doesn't understand them. 

In the second place we have "King Eden" by @RowanCarver. In the midst of an intergalactic war for earth's freedom, the Lord of a post-apocalyptic kingdom must rescue her son from the Martians, a dangerous race of cybernetic warriors who wish to claim the Earth for themselves. Victory requires sacrifice, defeat promises the destruction of everything King holds dear, but the ancients are a fearsome, unpredictable people, and King is no stranger to an impossible fight. 

Before we move on to our first prize winner, we would like to give honorable mentions to two intriguing stories that we think deserve your love and support. 

First honorable mention is "Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms" by @SandyDragon1. This is a story about a stay-at-home mom whose stress-baking turns into a recipe for disaster! 

Second honorable mention is "Dark Matter" by @RubyRanaWrites. This is a story about a doctoral candidate who finds out her dreamed-up panic attacks are more than just random dreams. 

And now...The moment we've been waiting for! 

Our First Prize Winner is "LeeWard" by @EmpiresOfWater . 

1800. HMS Ulysses mutinies off Trinidad and vanishes in the Caribbean. No one knows how many of the crew are left alive or what the mutineers plan to do with the vessel.

Captain Hiram Nightingale is a veteran of the wars which have raged throughout Europe and the Americas for the last decades. But a grand victory at the Battle of the Nile comes at a devastating cost to him, forcing him to reevaluate his successes. Plagued by wounds both physical and mental, he attempts to recover by accepting command of HMS Scylla. His task is to hunt down the mutinous Ulysses and bring the ship and crew to justice. 

Thank you to all those who participated in this contest, and congratulations to all of our winners, we will be in touch soon to award your prizes! And thank you everyone for reading this, and for telling your friends about us. We hope this pride month is going to be full of excitement, acceptance, and joy!