Call for submissions: Ons Klyntji zine 2025

Stuur jou gedigte, kortverhale, foto's en kuns – maar hou jou PDFs vir jouself

How are you all doing? 

Gather around, gather around – the Oval Office (is it the Offal Office?) of the absurd is open for business! 

If you are receiving this message, you already know what to do next … This is your casual reminder that submissions are open for your contributions towards the 2025 edition of Ons Klyntji zine. Email yours to zine@klyntji.com by midnight on 6 July 2025. 

Please see below for the to dos and to nots and forget me nots. Please also pass on the invite to all your friends, share the love! You can use the attached image in your posts.

Cheers en dankie,
Toast Coetzer and the OK zine team

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Riglyne / Guidelines:

- Send only your 3 best poems, in any language you please (if other than Afrikaans or English, please provide a translation).

- Important: Submit in a single Word document and add your name and surname to the top of the document. No PDFs please.

- For short stories (Afr / Eng), the word limit is 2 000 words. Submit in Word format and add your name to the top of the story. No PDFs please.

- You may also submit non-fiction (writings about music, road trips, nature, culture, anything really), non-sense, half-sense, faction, olfaction, WhatsApp group chat screen shots, a diatribe against streaming culture, an X-ray of that expensive Jibbitz inside your pet rabbit, your final words should you get to choose, Wikipedia facts you amended just last night, etc.

- Please do not submit written material in PDF format. We will only consider material submitted in Word. Please spell check before you press send and ask a friend to check for typos. Keep formatting simple.

- Please state your preferred name and surname clearly, especially if you use a nom de plume.

- For images (photos, drawings, cartoons, doodles, etc), submit the material in black-and-white (grayscale for photos). Material must be high-res Jpg files.

- Keep in mind that we print in B&W only, and that the book size is very small (A6). Visual material that “reads” well when printed small will be given preference.

- We do not pay contributors, but everyone who gets published will receive a free copy and can buy extra copies at near-cost (which you can then sell on for your own pocket).

- Copyright remains with individual contributors.

- Please no AI generated art or ChatGPT-written gibberish – except if there is a very good reason to do so, and then please be open about your method.

- There is no theme for submissions. We look for original pieces that capture something of our times – a truth, a sadness, a joy – and carries the clear ring of integrity. Love poems that mention Hendriek Bleik and Hyundai i10s will be preferred over straight-up cheesy ones (unless the cheese has gone off, and the power has been disconnected for 72 hours, and the carefully constructed online world you have been curating since 2017 has begun to fall apart).

- If you do not hear from us via email by 30 August, you can assume that your submission was not successful this time around.

- All contributions must be sent to zine@klyntji.com.

- The deadline is midnight on Sunday, 6 July 2025.

- Publication is scheduled for mid-September 2025.

What is Ons Klyntji? Ons Klyntji zine is an A6, 152-page, black-and-white paper publication celebrating South African and African creativity. We mostly publish poems, but also short stories, cartoons, photographs, etc. We operate under the auspices of klyntji.com. The zine is edited by Toast Coetzer, Erns Grundling, Joe Botha, Elodi Troskie, Elzanne Coetzee, Andréa Müller and others.

“Please no AI generated art or ChatGPT-written gibberish – except if there is a very good reason to do so, and then please be open about your method.”

— Ons vra mooi!