Write for Pelican

How?

• Join our 2023 Pelican Creators Group on Facebook for opportunities and content!

Or

• Contact pe[email protected] with articles, ideas, or to get in touch!

What Gets Published? 

So long as your content is free of anything so nasty as hate-speech, slurs, or any other kind of derogatory language, then we’re rolling. You’re welcome to send us fully-fledged, ready-to-go pieces, or ideas at their earliest beginnings.

We accept:

• Written content relating to our sub-sections. These include Arts, Campus News, Comedy, Diversity, Film, Finance and Economics, Music, Politics, and Technology and Games. We are open to reviews, interviews, cultural critiques, op-eds, and poetry.
• Art. Send through your graphic designs, drawings, digital illustrations, comics, photographs, photo essays, and images of 3-D art, such as sculpture, installation art, paintings, and basically anything else that you can put in a gallery.
• Multi-media content. If you have an idea for a video or podcast, we are keen to facilitate this.

Our readers are University students, so we are looking for submissions that keep this target audience in mind.

We’re also eternally grateful if you send us an image for us to publish alongside your content, be it from a royalty-free, stock image website (such as Pixabay) or an image you took with a professional camera (so that we can meet our 300 DPI requirements).

Read our style guide here for details on the requirements for written and visual submissions.

Online Submissions

Web articles can be submitted at any time. We try to keep submissions at around 600 – 800 words, but this is negotiable, depending on the piece. It’s best if you contact us or the relevant sub-section before you submit, so that we can workshop ideas and prevent double-ups.

We love online submissions that are topical and timely, that speak to our audiences now. These might be:

• News and events. Have you got a tip for us? Let us know and we are keen to either work with you to write a piece, or we can take it and run with it. UWA Makes Surprise Decision to Shut Down UWA Publishing and ‘Rape Crisis’ Critic and Social Commentator Bettina Arndt to Speak at UWA on March 7 are some Pelly highlights.
• Reviews. These can be for books, films, exhibitions, theatre, and anything else you want to critique and create a conversation around. Our favourite Pelican reviews are Midsommar Review: Pastel Coloured Nightmares and Fiery French Cinema: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Review).
• Interviews. We love interviews with UWA staff and students, local artists and musicians, politicians, and industry professionals. Interview with UniBank General Manager Mike Lanzing and Words with Jess Nyanda Moyle are great examples.
• Op-eds. If you have an opinion, and you want to write about it, then you can submit an op-ed piece. Pelican has published OP-ED: A Cr*ppling Approach to Disability Representation and OP-ED: We Need to Talk About Mexicana.
• Social video and podcasts. In 2019, Pelican experimented with What’s in the Pod (film), and published Presidential First Impressions With Pelican. In 2020, we’d love to expand our horizons. E-mail us if you have a pitch.

Print Submissions

Pelican runs six themed print editions per year. If you want to be published in print, we love pieces that are timeless; that is, people can read them in six months, one year, or ten years down the track, and they will still speak to those readers, or capture the mood of the period we live in now.

The kinds of works we love for print include:

• Interviews. We love interviews with UWA staff and students, local artists and musicians, politicians, and industry professionals.
• Op-eds. If you have an opinion, and you want to write about it, then you can submit an op-ed piece. Simple as that.
• Creative writing and poetry. We are experimenting with the idea of prompts for print issues, but we are always open to any content you submit to us. This includes non-fiction, prose, and poetry.
• Art. We can publish in colour, but you have a higher chance of seeing your work in print if you’re open to publishing in black and white; colour printing is expensive for a grassroots mag like Pelly. In saying that, we adore publishing art in our print editions. You can look above, under ‘What Get’s Published?,’ for more info.