The Perito Prize

Perito Prize

The Perito Prize is an international, annual, short fiction competition run by Perito Ltd

2019 celebrated the first year of the Perito Prize with a wide selection of high quality stories from writers of all ages, based all over the world. The Prize was created to get people thinking in different ways about inclusive environments, inclusion, diversity, accessibility and inclusive design!

For some people this conjures up thoughts of wheelchairs, hearing aids, and guide dogs, but we see the simple concept that all people should be able to contribute, participate, engage and have access to the world we all live in. Issues with access to spaces, social exclusion, lack of opportunity and different experiences can happen to anyone at any time - whether social, environmental, technological, physical, mobility impairment or injury, mental health, or less visible neuro-cognitive conditions.

We think there are so many great stories out there to celebrate the diverse world we live in. We want to hear them and share them so both our writers and readers start to try and think, analyse and design for inclusive environments in absolutely every we do.

The Perito Prize will be awarded to outstanding new short fiction of between 1000 and up to 2000 words. The cash prize goes to the 1st place but there will be special mentions and the option for various fun interviews, readings, with or without musical accompaniment, on the Perito website for 2nd and 3rd places. The finalists and a selection of the best stories from the year will also be published in that year’s Perito Prize Anthology which will be available to buy with all profits going to a selected charity which will change year by year. The Perito team will be the judges and their decisions are final.

Make sure to read through all the segments below for more information.



What do I have to do to enter?
Firstly, don’t start worrying about whether what you're going to do is right or good enough. Save that sort of stuff for later. What we are primarily interested in is understanding what inclusive environments, accessibility and inclusive design means to you.
Spelling and grammar isn’t as important as the story and the way you tell it.
You’re going to bring your story to life us by writing it down, making an audio recording (a mini audio book) or let us know if you would like to use some other way to tell your story. It will need to comply with the rules of entry.
It has to be of your own creation and make sure it hasn’t been published anywhere before.
Your story must be told in English and include a written transcript to show it meets the word count limits.

At Perito we think inclusive environments, accessibility and inclusive design are meant to be holistic and that, fundamentally, these themes are something that can benefit everyone. With that in mind, this competition is open to everyone, there is no location, age specification so this includes international writers too! The Perito Prize 2019 demonstrated that there are some brilliant writers from right around the world and we want to share your amazing short stories.

You just have to make sure the story is centred around the theme of accessibility, inclusion, diversity & inclusive environments. Also make sure it is able to be printed on the website so please don’t swear or write anything with potentially offensive content. This means no Fifty Shades of Access Auditing...

Here are some ideas to get you thinking but also check out some of the previous entries on the website for a look at what people have done in the past:
A story about the benefits of social inclusion.
A story about the damage of exclusion whether economic, accessibility, environmental, social, money, friendships, cultural etc…
A story that shares the experiences of the characters in a novel way so that readers get a new found understanding of the issues facing people.
How distant future technology plays a role.
How near future technology and innovation might develop.
Why neuro-diversity is important to everyone.
What accessibility or inclusion might have been like in your favourite historical time period.
Language, communication and symbols both now and in the future.
A story about an event that impacted on your story’s protagonist.
How you feel about the themes at this moment in time.
It must be a short story and read like a story.

This is meant to be fun so make sure you incorporate that into your journey. If you are a great technical writer, then that’ll shine through but the spirit of the prize is who can best put their impressions of accessibility and inclusive design into a story format. Overall readability is important to us, grammar errors are not.
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