A Sin of Writing
Competition for stories written by women of all ages

The deadline to register for “A Sin of Writing” – Competition for stories written by women of all ages has been extended to November 15.
For the first edition of the competition, year 2025-2026, the chosen theme is the decisive issue in everyone’s life: WORK.

The Society for the Encyclopedia of Women aps announces an annual short story competition reserved for women of all ages, curated by Monica Randi.

The choice to read and especially to “write” has been for women throughout history a decisive act of independence, the gesture through which each woman has found, within the orderly if not suffocating grid of social, familial, or emotional expectations, a space and time for herself, the opportunity to become a subject, to say “I”: I feel, I think, I transcribe, I tell.

Even in difficult times for women, writing has allowed them to express, narrate, document: the cultivated and educated kind, that of philosophy and poetry, but also the simpler kind, excluded by class or “gender” from literary “canons”. Today we know that everything, from letters to published writings, from embroidered words to diaries, from wills to poems, from leaflets to hidden memoirs, constitutes precious documentation that tells not only a single life but illuminates the collective contexts animated, always, by the living female presence, long removed from memory and from the shared “encyclopedia.”

Writing is therefore an act of freedom in many respects, a sin of presence that still maintains its energy intact.

The Competition is open to all women who have reached 18 years of age by June 20; the announcement is published on the enciclopediadelledonne.it website and on the concorsiletterari.net platform.
The stories judged best will be published in an anthology.

A project by enciclopediadelledonne.it, in collaboration with Archivio del Lavoro, Camera del Lavoro of Milan and Fondazione Elvira Badaracco, under the patronage of the Metropolitan City of Milan.