Prizes and Partnerships Portfolio Lead: Australasian Association of Writing Programs
The AAWP Prizes and Partnerships Portfolio is managed by AAWP President | Chair, Associate Professor Julia Prendergast.
AAWP prizes have been ratified by Arts Law: ‘Arts Law was very impressed with AAWP’s attitude, which clearly demonstrated AAWP’s respect for writers.’
You can read more here: Arts Law Advises AAWP on Best Practice

Have you written a novella in prose or verse? Or a hybrid novella that crosses genre boundaries? Enter the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) and Recent Work Press (RWP) ‘Novella Prize’ for your chance to win.
If you win you will receive: a written commendation from AAWP. This ‘tick of approval’ will see your manuscript assessed without delay. You will, effectively, leap to the top of the submissions pile. You will also receive a $500.00 cash prize and fully subsidised conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP (November 2026) where you will be invited to read from your work.
If your full manuscript is as robust as the synopsis and opening extract, you may secure a publishing contract with RWP: https://recentworkpress.com
Take advantage of this stunning opportunity. Fast track your writing journey in a fiercely competitive market.
Read the full terms of entry here.
Publication News
2024 winning entry of the inaugural AAWP and Spineless Wonders Novella Prize, Eggshell by Olivia De Zilva, will be published in November 2025 with Spineless Wonders.
2025 Winner: A Turn About the Garden by Nick Clarke
Author Bio
Nick Roger Clarke lives in Warburton, Victoria, on Wurundjeri land. His fiction writing has appeared in World Literature Today and Soft Quarterly, while his non-fiction has been published by The Age, Runners Tribe, and a range of culture magazines. He has self-published two collections of short stories (2018, 2023) and makes positive impact video series for a living.
Judges’ Report
The opening excerpt of A Turn About the Garden is a wry, eloquent and fast-paced portrait of what comes after idealisation subsides. The author’s use of first-person point of view permits a voice that’s deft and well-observed, at once slightly jaded and hopeful. The story paints the encounter between a couple who have ‘only lived in one city’ and the shifting realities of becoming responsible for an established garden, that is filled to the brim with emotionally demanding roses. Unfolding in a regional mountain community, the crags of its misty mountain range might be ones that readers will recognise. Everything is idyllic and far from idyllic. The author has captured the vagaries of a ruminating internal monologue reconsidering its decisions and confronting their gritty, repetitive consequences. Far from being navel-gazing, the effect is rather one of side-splitting hilarity and razor-sharp analysis gambolling along in a variegated text that wields questions, quotations, and swath of modes of dramatizing the narrative’s preoccupations. It’s a generous offering-up-of-self by a newbie tree-changer who is getting a crash course in horticulture, clothesline removal, surveillance capitalism, small community and their existential and ideological disorientation. Not entirely reliable, and more approachable for that, this voice skips across ideas, contemporary dilemmas, sketches of interpersonal run-ins and gorgeous and fluent renderings of the work’s glorious setting. Who mightn’t make the exact same choices if presented with a the chance to own what might be ‘the most beautiful residential garden that either … had set foot in’? Reflective and a little arch rather than moralising, darkly fretful and ankle deep in the hubris of objectifying “natural beauty”, there is an incredible agility to the graceful prose which remains readable, astute and entirely itself. You will laugh; you will blush; you will recognise shards of all of our shared geopolitical brokenness, sincere trying and blundering courage. A rollicking, timely and intelligent read.
Second Place: Tobin Park by Kangli Hu
Third Place: White Foam by Yannick Thoraval
Highly Commended: The Ballad of Reef Jones by Kathryn Lister
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: Eggshell by Olivia De Zilva
- 2024 Highly Commended: My Mother Didn’t Want Me To Get A Tattoo by Kathryn Crowley, and The Longing by Alberta Natasia Adji
- 2024 Commended: Emotional Eaters by E Chennatt, and Protest by Irma Gold

Enter your poem in the ‘AAWP/UWRF Emerging Writers’ Prize for Poetry for your chance to win.
If you win you will receive: a festival pass to UWRF and accommodation for the duration of the festival (*Terms and Conditions apply, see below). In addition, you will receive fully subsidised conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP. The editors at Meniscus will also consider your work for publication.
Take advantage of this stunning opportunity to celebrate the craft of writing at Southeast Asia’s largest and most exciting literary festival. Be welcomed into the thriving community of writers within the AAWP. Enter your poem and make the most of this generous publication pathway and networking opportunity for emerging writers.
Read the full terms of entry here.
2025 Winner: ‘Before the Rise’ – Edward Kus
Author Bio
Poetry is a way Edward Kus punctuates his life; clarifying and expressing its colour and perspective, and building breathing spaces in the rushes. Ed is a father, husband, lawyer and poet based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Poetry helps him to glimpse and articulate his experience that is all those multitudes combined. You can find more poems by Ed at https://substack.com/@edkus
Judge’s Report
‘Before the Rise’ catches the eye because of its backward structure—from stanza IV to I. Then for its arresting images from ‘greyed ripples of soft blue glow’ to ‘rocky groyne’ and the glorious ‘Sunrise like a fresh white peach / poached in an almost empty sky’ to ‘thrones of rocky gold’ and sudden turn to the speaker’s experiencing the solstice as ‘dark hands curling up my legs’ until the final insight ‘before the rise’.
Rhythm, however, is this poem’s subtle driver. Rewarding and gratifying, it is used to reinforce or underline nuances and inflections through judicious variations. And pauses. The ear attunes to this music-making. Spell-bound, it occurred to me that many people say they delight in poetry for its particular concentration. Its compression. Reading this ‘backward narrative poem’, though, confirmed tome that such sense of compression ironically derives from the way a poet uses silence to highlight particular words or phrases to make the reader re-think language and find new delight in it.
‘Before the Rise’ will cast its spell on many a reader.
Highly Commended: ‘Ice Cream’ by Shoshanna Rockman
Commended: ‘Burnover’ by Taylor Bell
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: ‘Circle Time’ by Joanne Ambrose
- 2024 Second Place: ‘After’ by Tim Loveday
- 2024 Third Place: ‘The Riddle’ by Leonardo Chung
- 2024 Highly Commended: ‘Bark’ by Daniel Tanure Benício, and ‘Learn to Ride’ by Verity Oswin

This prize is offered in partnership with the UBUD Writers and Readers Festival, and is aimed at emerging writers of short fiction.
If you win you will receive: a festival pass to UWRF and accommodation for the duration of the festival (*Terms and Conditions apply, see below). In addition, you will receive fully subsidised conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP. The editors at Meniscus will also consider your work for publication.
Take advantage of this stunning opportunity to celebrate the craft of writing at Southeast Asia’s largest and most exciting literary festival. Be welcomed into the thriving community of writers within the AAWP. Enter your short story and make the most of this generous publication pathway and networking opportunity for emerging writers. Entries should not exceed 3000 words.
Read the full terms of entry here.
2025 Winner: ‘Cats in Canals’ by Andrew Carmichael
Author Bio
Andrew Carmichael is an aspiring writer living in Sydney. He currently works as a scientist at the Australian Nuclear Science Organisation and enjoys writing short stories with a focus on realism and themes of familial or communal responsibility.
Judge’s Report
It is a plague of cats that heralds catastrophe in this sophisticated yet seemingly gentle and moving tale where the author opens up a world of finely observed detail. But soon, the reader realises cats may symbolise wider aspects of human relationships embedded in cultural and personal history.
Beguiling and compelling, ‘Cats in Canals’ is all the more heartbreaking for the subtlety and tact of its decanted writing: no flurry, no pyrotechnics here. This is the work of a writer with an undeniable gift for language—not as an inert resource, but as a living thing capable of conveying and inducing empathy.
‘Cats in Canals’ announces the arrival of a great talent on the scene of the short story. Its author has a pitch-prefect voice and a feeling for the precise moment at which to deliver an ending with merciless thwack. Yes, I was not prepared.
Highly Commended: ‘A Foreign City Called Memory’ by Alice Niall
Commended: ‘Patience’ by Rebecca Douglas
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: ‘Water Casting’ by Jane Crowley
- 2024 Second Place: ‘The Saltbush Variations’ by Linda Atkins
- 2024 Third Place: ‘Halahala’ by Lee Hana
- 2024 Highly Commended: ‘Survival in a Glass of Water’ by Raluca Comanelea, and ‘Pocketful of Poison’ by Cassandra Cook

In 2026, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) and Westerly Magazine are offering a prize for Life Writing. We welcome submissions of autobiography, biography, memoir, and essays. We celebrate Life Writing as a rumination upon memory and experience and encourage creative and hybrid approaches.
The prize is open to writers at all stages of their journey; emerging and established writers are welcome to enter. The prize recognises excellence in nonfiction, creative nonfiction and hybrid modes of storytelling. Hybrid storytelling is broadly conceived as storytelling that crosses traditional boundaries of nonfiction and creative nonfiction and/or is experimental in form.
We invite you to send Life Writing submissions of up to 3500 words. The winner will receive a written commendation from AAWP, a $500 cash prize, a one-year subscription to Westerly, and conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP, where they will be invited to read from their work. Please see item 3 (Terms and conditions). The winner’s work will be considered for publication by Westerly.
We encourage you to take advantage of this stunning opportunity to celebrate diverse interpretations of nonfiction, creative nonfiction and hybrid modes of storytelling, and be welcomed into the thriving community of writers associated with the AAWP.
Read the full terms of entry here.
2025 Winner: ‘Acts of Self-Preservation’ by Rashida Murphy
Author Bio
Rashida Murphy is the author of a novel (The Historian’s Daughter) and a collection of short stories (The Bonesetter’s Fee). She lives in Boorloo/Perth on the lands of the Noongar Nation. Her work is published in Westerly, Southern Crossings, Cordite Review, Portside Review, Joao-Roque Journal and in several international anthologies. Her novella titled Old Ghosts is forthcoming with Night Parrot Press in 2026. She is currently working on a collection of personal essays. Rashida is the founder of The Writers’ Collective, an organisation dedicated to an anti-racist and decolonial arts practice.
Judges’ Report
This piece is remarkable for the layered resonance of its prose. It offers, through a fragmented and fluid structure, a deeply intimate portrayal of diasporic identity, memory, and generational legacy. The work moves with controlled vulnerability, threading through trauma, displacement, matrilineal bonds, and the dissonance of cultural belonging in a voice that is lyrical yet incisive. Through temporal shifts and non-linear form, it delivers a powerful meditation on the emotional geography of migration and the quiet violence of assimilation. Its strength lies in the sustained tension between inherited silence and deliberate articulation, a poetic register that makes grief and memory visible without spectacle. The evocation of ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, lends the piece a tenderness, drawing the reader inward and anchoring them in the blurred boundaries of family, faith, and loss. The central consciousness is fierce, clear-eyed, and complex: refusing erasure and naming injustice in ways that are both subtle and striking. We congratulate the author on a piece that is as courageous as it is beautifully written.
Highly Commended
‘An Bees’ by Marina O
Judges’ Report:
This tangled and densely intertextual work offers a complex rumination on identity, memory, and interwoven notions of personhood and selfhood. As the title suggests, it draws on a deep consciousness of the malleability of words as a means to develop its thinking, teaching its reader to reapproach the semantics of identity as a space for self-empowerment. A poetic sensibility for form is striking in creating both energy and tension in the work. The motif of the bee situates all that is at stake in this, both in terms of identity formation, and in terms of the piece’s awareness of the complex geopolitics situating both self and family. The connection to war in Ukraine as a continuous present alters and makes precarious the domestic past of that space. At the same time, moments of uncertainty and ambiguity open this context out into a broader frame of empathy within conflict. The interwoven facets of the piece – self, identity, gender, family, memory, social politics – ultimately are suggestive of a deep interest in the implications of conflict across all levels, from the body right out to the global scale. Most significantly, though, the piece maintains a vulnerable but vital thread of hope, carrying the reader through.
‘Neoprene Machine’ by Libby Angel
Judges’ Report:
This piece resonated in its warmth and gentle humanity, striking out into the apparent randomness of open swimming as a means to contemplate how we make meaning within life more generally. It plays with irreverence and comic effect as an extension of its resistance of social norms, and its acknowledgment of a social conservatism sitting deep within mainstream Australian culture. At the same time, the interest in the piece is as much about survival of this on a personal level – with an emphasis on self-empowerment and self-care – as it is about making a gentle challenge to the status quo. These things are balanced contemplatively and carefully in the work, and turn reflectively with something of the same rhythm of the action of swimming held at its centre. The conclusion, bringing the tension of the work to a head with an inevitability which is beautifully managed, offers a potent ambiguity to the idea of survival, while at the same time emphasising presence in the world as both antidote and salvation.
2025 Longlist:
- ‘The Unrequiteds’ by Lily Chan
- ‘Sisters in the Morning’ by Rosa Cass
- ‘The Narcissist’ by Libby Angel
- ‘Sonata in Me Major’ by Josh McGlaughlin
- ‘Hello, World’ by Tenille McDermott
- ‘Little Cloud’ by Jena Woodhouse
- ‘Savings’ by Rachel Leary
- ‘Sutures’ by Farah Elrifai
- ‘Chunks’ by Judyth Emanuel
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: ‘tiger man’ by Rose Hunter
- 2024 Highly Commended: ‘The Blue House’ by Oliver Shaw, and ‘Our unmoored selves’ by Dani Netherclift
- 2023 – ‘There is another world, but it is this one’ by Luke Allan
- 2023 Second Place: ‘Monster mouth’ by Leila Wright
- 2023 Third Place: ‘There are no waves down here’ by Soren Tae Smith
- 2023 Highly Commended: ‘Thinking about ornithophobia’ by Michael Farrell
- 2023 Highly Commended: ‘The lotus lake’ by Elizabeth Tyson-Doneley
- 2022 – ‘Doors’ by Suzanne Hermanoczki – Read the winning entry on the Westerly website, here

This prize is offered in partnership with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF), and is open to translators at any stage of their career.
The winner receives a written commendation from AAWP, a festival pass to UWRF and accomodation for the duration of the festival (*Terms and Conditions apply, see below). In addition, you will receive fully subsidised conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP, where you will be invited to read from your work. The editors at Meniscus Literary Journal will also consider your work for publication.
Entries must be no more than 30 lines (poetry) or 3000 words (prose), and entrants can translate their own work into English. AAWP/UWRF recognise that translation is an act of interpretation, even when the original work is the translator’s own.
Entries must include a cover letter (maximum one A4 page, not included in the word count). This should incorporate a ‘Translator’s Statement of Intention’ addressing your aims in approaching this particular work of translation, including (but not limited to): limitations, possibilities and aims, together with any pertinent information re. the original author (if the work is not the translator’s own). The cover letter is assessed as part of the judging process.
Read the full terms of entry here.cccxxx
Publication News
Alison Entrekin, the winner of the 2022 AAWP/UWRF Translators’ Prize for Great Sertão: Meanderings, has a contract with Simon & Schuster U.S. and Bloomsbury Publishing U.K. for the publication of the same work, now with the definitive title Vastlands: The Crossing (January 2027). Entrekin has received the following GLORIOUS accolade for the forthcoming book: Officer of the Order of Rio Branco. The decoration, awarded by the Brazilian government, honours individuals for achievements in diplomacy and contributions to the nation. For further information, please see the official announcement on the Brazilian government website.
Previous winner of the AAWP and UWRF Translators’ Prize, Irina Sadovina’s translation of White Moss by Anna Nerkagi will be published by Pushkin Press in 2026. This edition includes Sadovina’s winning entry for the 2021 Prize.
2025 Winner: ‘Jolie’ translated by Thila Varghese
Translator Bio
Thila Varghese is a writer and translator based in Canada, where she works part-time as a writing advisor at Western University. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. One of Thila’s translations was a finalist in the 2025 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts, and another received a First-Time Entrant Commendation in the 2024 Stephen Spender Prize. Thila received the 2024 ALTA/SALT Mentorship in Poetry from a South Asian language. Her translation entry was shortlisted in the 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Three of Thila’s original short stories have been longlisted in Canadian national short story competitions, and one of them was shortlisted and was published in a Canadian anthology in 2023.
Translator’s Statement
‘Jolie,’ a short story by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Italian writer Enrico Castelnuovo, is a masterful psychological portrait of grief, centered on Clara, a mother mourning the death of her young daughter, Olga. I was drawn to this story for its emotional depth and intimate realism, which does not seek to dramatise loss but portrays it through small, everyday objects such as a doll, a hoop and a toy kitchen. These items become vessels of memory for the mother, and their removal is as painful as the loss itself.
My primary aim in translating ‘Jolie’ was to faithfully reflect the original Italian short story, preserving its thematic integrity and emotional subtlety. I sought to capture in translation the quiet intensity of Clara’s grief without embellishment, maintaining the delicate balance Castelnuovo strikes between restraint and emotional nuance. The story’s power lies in its understatement, in how ordinary objects become symbols of irrevocable loss, and how maternal devotion becomes a form of self-denial so complete it borders on self-erasure. Translating ‘Jolie’ was, for me, a way of honouring this quiet, emotionally resonant depiction of grief, while bringing forward the delicate power of Castelnuovo’s literary voice.
Judge’s Report
‘Jolie’ is a fine translation of a short story by the Italian writer Enrico Castelnuovo portraying a mother’s grief in the aftermath of the loss of her young daughter. The translation espouses the original lexicon and diction as well as its intimate psychological register. The translator’s approach reminds me of Italo Calvino’s statement in The Literature Machine where he evokes Homer’s mermaids, suggesting that not only do they sing, but also want to be listened to, their singing constituting the extreme point of arrival of writing, the ultimate core of poetic speech. Like the sirens’ song, ‘Jolie’ conjures up the literary representation of creative space. In particular, I detect—indeed, feel—the intimate register of the original text imbedded in flashbacks, breaks in rhythm, introspective flashes, ellipses and metaphorical allusions, linking one word to another, one world to another. Despite the ghostly traces of another language, of another time and sensibility, this translation transcends linguistic matter and participates in poetic performance.
Highly Commended: ‘1995 In Buenos Aires’ translated by Judith Mendoza-White
Commended: ‘Entry No. 9 from My Grandmother’s Autograph Album’ translated by Miriam Wei Wei Lo
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: ‘Informal Abstraction’ by Alison Entrekin
- 2024 Second Place: ‘Two Funerals’ by Thila Varghese
- 2024 Third Place: ‘The Magic Ring’ by Sian Valvis
- 2024 Highly Commended: ‘on the consolation of elegy’ by Dean Gessie, and ‘A Confession to a Murder’ by Noora Bahar
- 2023 Winner: ‘Introduction to Darkness’ by Leila S. Chudor – John McGlynn
- 2023 Second Place: Bruma by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida – Alison Entrekin
- 2023 Third Place: ‘Buldoser’ by AS Laksana – Pamela Allen
- 2023 Highly Commended: ‘Knocker’ from GJAK by Dimosthenis Papamarkos – Sian Valvis
- 2023 Highly Commended: Kumo o sagasu (Looking for spiders (and Clouds)) by Kanako Nishi – Allison Powell
- 2022 – Great Sertão: Meanderings by João Guimarães Rosa – Alison Entrekin – Alison’s translation will be published by Simon and Schuster, for publication under its alternate title Vastlands: The Crossing, in 2026
- 2021 – White Moss by Anna Nerkagi – Irina Sadovina – Irina’s translation of White Moss will be published by Pushkin Press in 2026.
- 2021 Highly Commended – Dante: The Faery and the Wizard by Alberta Adji – Alberta Adji
- 2021 Highly Commended – Collecting Butterflies by Sergei Aksakov – Kevin Windle
- 2020 – 423 colores by Juan Gallardo and Rafael Avendaño – Lilit Thwaites

We are deeply interested in capturing a composite “picture” of what people are writing about. Now. Please send creative work—short-short fiction, “sudden” fiction, “sketchy” stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, as well as hybrid forms.
We are accepting submissions on the following scale: up to 400 words prose, 40 lines for poetry, 200 words for prose poems, and the equivalent for hybrid forms. Submissions must be previously unpublished. Please send your most polished work, without delay.
If you win you will receive a written commendation from AAWP and a $500 cash prize. You will have your work published on the Express Media website and receive a Voiceworks subscription. You will also receive fully subsidised conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP, where you will be invited to read from your work.
Read the full terms of entry here.
Publication News
2024 winner of the AAWP and Express Media Sudden Writing Prize Eartha Davis’ debut poetry collection màthair beinn – featuring her prize winning entry ‘a’ deanamh gràidh, a’ deanamh bròn’ – was published in September 2025 by Vagabond Press.
2025 Winner: ‘Food Baby’ by Ledya Khamou
Author Bio
Ledya Khamou is a writer and Honours student at the University of Melbourne.
Judges’ Report
‘Food Baby’ was selected as the 2025 winner of the AAWP and Express Media Sudden Writing Prize for its bold exploration of the taboo space where love and bowel movements intersect. Lines like ‘There’s other tallying widgets on the app, like and “I love you” counter, but we only use the pooping widget’ capture the author’s deft use of humour to convey ~ in candid detail ~ their sense of embodied love and search for control. ‘Food Baby’ made us laugh even as it made us ponder its universal themes of control and intimacy, or lack there of.
Second Place
‘second adolescence’ by Saanjana Kapoor
Third Place
‘January’ by Eden Crain
Shortlisted/Commended
‘Exit Sign’ by Nimrada Silva, and ‘The River Watches Me’ by Parvati Dinesh
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: ‘a’ deanamh gràidh, a’ deanamh bròn’ by Eartha Davis
- 2024 Second Place: ‘Out West’ by Siena Bordignon
- 2024 Third Place: ‘Cross by the river’ by Kobi Simpson
- 2024 Highly Commended: ‘The commute’ by Saanjana Kapoor, and ‘Behind the scenes’ by Zoe Sorenson
- 2023 Winner: ‘this is the earth’s Alarm system going off’ – Maz Howard – Read the 2023 winning entry on the Express Media website, here
- 2023 Second Place – Second Place: ‘Vaginapoem’ – Coco Stallman
- 2023 Third Place: ‘There is a song you used to sing to me’ – Martina Kontos
- 2023 Highly Commended: ‘cyber_memory_archive.exe’ – Matthew Platakos
- 2022 – ‘Hereditary’ by Jeimer Ng – Read the 2022 winning entry on the Express Media website, here
- 2022 Highly Commended: ‘Before it was white’ by Isabelle Biondi Saville
- 2021 – ‘Crack’ by Zoe Davidson – Read the 2021 winning entry on the Express Media website, here
- 2021 Highly Commended: ‘Everyday Supernovae’ by Jeimer Ng
- 2020 – ‘Little Apocalypse’ by Raphail Spartalis – Read the 2020 winning entry on the Express Media website, here

Have you written a poetry collection, literary novel, short story collection or a hybrid work that crosses genre boundaries? Enter the Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ (AAWP) ‘Chapter One’ competition for your chance to win.
If you win you will receive: a written commendation from AAWP and a letter of recommendation to the University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP). This ‘tick of approval’ will see your manuscript assessed without delay. You will, effectively, leap to the top of the submissions pile. You will also receive a $500.00 cash prize and fully subsidised conference fees to attend the annual conference of the AAWP (November 2026) where you will be invited to read from your work.
If your full manuscript is as robust as ‘Chapter One’ you may secure a publishing contract with UWAP: http://uwap.uwa.edu.au.
Take advantage of this stunning opportunity. Fast track your writing journey in a fiercely competitive market.
You must be an AAWP member, and you may enter as many times as you like.
Read the full terms of entry here.
2025 Winner: Other People’s Children by Lee Casey
Author Bio:
Lee Casey is a writer who lives in Melbourne/Naarm. After completing a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Creative Writing) from the University of Melbourne, she has worked in communications for cultural organisations and festivals in Australia and the UK. She is a graduate of the Faber Academy Write a Novel program. This is her first novel.
Judge’s Report
Other People’s Children is a highly perceptive, engaging and entertaining piece of fiction that presents the relationships between different women involved in maternal care, including its challenges and aspirations. The work presents markedly different, sometimes clashing and always fascinating intersecting perspectives on motherhood, while subtly dramatising important issues connected to feminism, grief and desire. Issues of fertility are canvassed, along with existential questions centred on finding meaning, fulfilment and gratification. Long-standing and seemingly intractable issues connected to family life are also compellingly realised in this polished and sophisticated work.
Second Place: The Sweeter by Monique Marani
Third Place: Making an Artefact by Johanna Ellersdorfer
Past Winners:
- 2024 Winner: The Taste of Cedars by Anne Hotta
- 2024 Second Place: The Elementals by Liz Allan
- 2024 Third Place: Un/Common Thread by Meg Dunley
- 2023 Winner: The Freelancer – Jonathan O’Brien
- 2023 Second Place/Highly Commended – The End of Experience – Martin Kovan
- 2023 Third Place – Dear Mutzi – Tess Scholfield-Peters
- 2022 Winner – Ordinariness by Gillian Hagenus
- 2021 Winner – Linda Godfrey
- 2021 Highly Commended – Peter Ramm
- 2021 Highly Commended – Katherine Mann
- 2020 Winner – Lisa Dowdall
- 2020 Highly Commended – Anne Hotta
- 2019 Winner – Benjamin Muir
- 2018 Winner – Wendy Riley
- 2018 Highly Commended Greg Woodland
- 2017 Winner – Joshua Kemp
- 2017 Highly Commended – Melanie Pryor
- 2016 Winner – Ruby Todd
- 2015 Winner – Luke Johnson