The deadline for submission of originals ends on May 31st
The legendary publishing house Il Giallo Mondadori will publish the work and then sell it in Italian newsstands
The Festival Atlántico de Género Negro Tenerife Noir and its equivalent in the Italian capital, NeRoma, have recently announced the second edition of their award for unpublished crime stories in Spanish. The deadline for submission of originals ends on May 31st and the jury’s decision will be announced at the famous Italian noir literature event this October.
The winning story will be translated into Italian and will be published by prestigious publishing house Il Giallo Mondadori, which will distribute it on newsstands in its country. Il Giallo Mondadori is the name of a crime series created in 1929, legendary for Italian readers. The relevance and influence of this literary collection led to this genre being known in Italy as Giallo – Italian for yellow – in reference to the impactful design of its covers, which are predominantly yellow.
At the tenth edition of Tenerife Noir, in March 2025, we will enjoy the presence of the first recipient of this award, Alberto Palacios Santos, who won for his story “En las novelas negra siempre llueve” (“It Always Rains in Noir Novels”). Palacios will receive the award and a copy of the publication of his story in Italian from the directors of Tenerife Noir and NeRoma, Alejandro Martín and Fabio Mundadori, respectively. In 2024, 52 texts were submitted and the stories “Don Serafín”, by Manuel Nononidez García, and “Una tristísima ceniza” (“Very Sad Ash”), by Emilio Sierra García, were also selected as finalists.
The Tenerife Noir Special Award is a section of the NeRoma Unpublished Short Story Award category. Its creation was one of the fruits borne of the last edition of the Cartel del Meridiano Cero, a meeting space created by the Tenerife event to generate synergy between directors and producers of international noir crime festivals. Fabio Mundadori, director of the NeRoma Noir Festival, the crime and detective genre festival of the Eternal City, participated in the session of this meeting held at the IX edition of Tenerife Noir (2024).
Among the collaborations signed between both festivals following the aforementioned meeting, the promotion of literary creation stands out, hence the new Spanish section of the NeRoma Award for unpublished crime stories in Spanish. With this initiative and European collaboration, Tenerife Noir promotes the incursion of Canarian creators into new literary markets, in addition to promoting the Canary Island where this ambitious cultural program was born.
Submission Rules
Stories must be submitted before midnight on May 31st, 2025, electronically, and only electronically, and attached to the completed online form created specifically for this purpose. Only documents in .doc or .docx formats will be accepted.
Among the criteria of the rules of this international literary competition promoted by Tenerife Noir in the 2025 edition, it is also established that the works submitted must be unpublished, that is, they must not have been published even online. The maximum length of the texts must be 20 pages, with a minimum of 25,000 characters and a maximum of 40,000, with no exceptions. Each author may participate with only one work.
Furthermore, these rules establish that the competition is for authors who are European citizens; the selected works will be translated into Italian without any obligation to consult the author and Tenerife Noir will be in charge of selecting the stories. From all the entries, the Festival Atlántico de Género Negro will choose the five stories considered most worthy of reaching the final.
The selected stories will be examined by a final jury, made up of experts – appointed after the pre-selection phase – who will choose the winner. The jury’s decision will be announced in the Italian capital on October 19th, 2025 during the VIII edition of the NeRoma Noir Festival, in the presence of the organisers of NeRoma, Simona Teodori, Fabio Mundadori and Chiara de Magistris; the director of Tenerife Noir, Alejandro Martín Perera; and the editorial director of the Mondadori series, Franco Forte. The work will then be published as an appendix to an issue of Il Giallo Mondadori and will be on Italian newsstands in March 2026.
