Call for submissions: Big Issue x Creativity & Wellbeing Week 2026 – #CriticalHope

1. Articles of 300-1,000 words – they must be accessible and enjoyable for regular readers of the magazine, and written in plain English – definitely no jargon!

2. Creative submissions – anything that could be printed in a 2-dimensional format. This might be a poem, illustration, or something that allows the reader to engage creatively through e.g. a puzzle or colouring-in.

Thanks to funding from our Thrive LDN partnership and Arts Council England funding, we can offer a fee of £150 for each article or creative submission we choose for The Big Issue.

We don’t need you to send anything now, we’re just keen to hear your ideas – we will let you know if you’re successful and then you’ll have two weeks to produce the article or creative submission.

The theme of the special edition is “critical hope”.

“Critical hope” is about realistically assessing the environment through a lens of equity and justice while envisioning a better future. Championed by Paulo Freire, critical hope is an active, necessary, and realistic, rather than passive or naive, stance against oppression and despair. The theme acknowledges the increasing precarity in the health and care sectors including the impending NHS redundancies, ongoing instability in funding for Creative Health and the rising pressures linked to planetary health and climate change. Read more about this or watch our presentation about it on our website.

We hope that this edition and Creativity & Wellbeing Week will gather the sector in a space of critical hope, reconnecting practitioners with their passion and inviting visions for the future of creative health.

Any work you submit must be original (not published anywhere else before). We are also looking for some submissions to focus specifically on creative planetary health (i.e. work with creativity that addresses climate change and/or environmental degradation as well as health and wellbeing). If you would be interested in submitting an idea, please send the following by 5pm on Wednesday 25 March.

We will inform you whether you have been successful by 5pm on Monday 31 March.

Please also confirm that you will be able to submit a finished piece to us by 5pm on Wednesday 15 April latest – this gives you two weeks to finish your piece.

We expect this call-out to be competitive, and we are trying to cover different topics and types of work, as well as different areas of the country. If you have submitted work and we are not able to include this in the special edition, we would like to suggest including this on our own organisations websites or the Creativity & Wellbeing Week site instead.

We would also be interested in receiving photographs of your work, but unfortunately we’re not in a position to pay a fee for these.

As ever we’re especially interested in hearing from under-represented writers and creatives including people of diverse heritages, genders and sexualities, people identifying as d/Deaf, Disabled or neurodiverse, and younger people.