Spellbinder is an independent, self-sustaining quarterly literary and arts magazine that brings together writers, poets, dramatists, and visual artists from around the world. We celebrate original, thought-provoking work across fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, drama, and visual art, providing a space for emerging voices to experiment, challenge conventions, and explore new ways of seeing the world.
Spellbinder’s Story
Spellbinder was founded in 2020 by a group of students in Durham, England. Since then, our team has grown to include editors from around the world, united by a shared love of literature and the arts. As an independent magazine, we rely on the time, care, and enthusiasm of our volunteers to keep the publication running and our creative community growing.
Today, Spellbinder is led by Co-Editors-in-Chief Effy Kousteni and Tatianna Victoria, alongside a dedicated team whose contributions make each issue possible.
The Spellbinder Manifesto
Spellbinder has a simple belief: art matters, especially when the world insists it doesn’t.
We live in a time that asks creativity to justify itself. Stories are expected to become content and poems are measured by engagement. Art is flattened to be consumed, scrolled past and forgotten. We believe that literature should resist that impulse.
Spellbinder exists to make space for work that refuses to hurry and asks difficult questions instead of offering easy answers. Work that unsettles, delights, grieves and imagines. In a culture increasingly driven by certainty, speed and performance, we remain committed to curiosity, ambiguity and close attention.
We publish quarterly in print and digital formats, bringing together poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama and visual art united by originality, craft and emotional honesty. We are especially drawn to psychologically rich storytelling and work that inhabits thresholds: moments of uncertainty, transformation and contradiction. Whether realist, surreal or somewhere in between, we look for pieces that earn their imagination through emotional truth.
We believe literature has always been one of the ways people make sense of the world and, occasionally, remake it. Art cannot solve every crisis, but it can preserve complexity in a culture that increasingly rewards simplicity. It reminds us that people are rarely reducible to headlines, algorithms or certainty.
That belief also shapes how we work. We welcome writers and artists from every background, tradition and lived experience, and we are committed to reading every submission with openness and care. We reject discrimination in all its forms and believe the strongest creative work begins not with dogma, but with curiosity.
Spellbinder is a home for work that stays with its reader. Every issue is carefully assembled through conversation, collaboration and an enduring belief that great writing still has the power to surprise us. Long after trends have passed and the news cycle has moved on, stories remain—and that’s why we do this.
Spellbinder’s Style
Spellbinder seeks writing and art that push beyond the familiar. For writers, we are drawn to psychologically rich fiction, evocative poetry, experimental forms and creative nonfiction that explores contradiction, identity, memory and the stranger corners of human experience. We value distinctive voices, precise language and narratives that embrace ambiguity over easy answers. For artists, we welcome expressive illustration, unconventional composition, surreal imagery and experimental approaches to colour, texture and form. Across both disciplines, we are particularly interested in work that inhabits the space between the real and the imagined, finds beauty in discomfort and approaches familiar subjects from unexpected angles.
Celebrating Our Contributors
At the heart of Spellbinder are the writers, artists and creatives who bring each issue to life. We believe that celebrating their achievements is part of celebrating creativity itself. Through our Celebrate Success pages, featured in every quarterly issue, we recognise our contributors’ milestones and the many paths their creative journeys take.
We’re also committed to supporting their work beyond publication, nominating selected pieces for the Pushcart Prize and championing the talent that makes our magazine what it is. By celebrating our contributors, we hope to honour their dedication and inspire others to keep creating, sharing and discovering where their work might lead.
Spellbinder’s Pushcart Prize Nominees
Pushcart Prize 2022 (Aimee Lowenstern; Jocelyne Lamarche; Rishika Pandit).
Pushcart Prize 2023 (Danielle Gilmour; Douglas Jern; Oliver Brooks).
Pushcart Prize 2024 (Jerrod Schwartz; Probert Dean; Rose Mason).