Conference Prizes for Postgraduates

2026 AAWP Conference Postgraduate Paper Prizes

The 2026 AAWP Conference will take place from 2 – 4 December.

Further details and a call for abstracts are forthcoming. 

Check the Conference page for the most current details.

To reward Postgraduate excellence in scholarly practice, the AAWP Executive will once again award two prizes for papers presented at the annual conference. A $250 cash prize will be awarded for the Best Academic Postgraduate Paper (scholarly stream) and the Best Creative/Hybrid Postgraduate Paper (creative stream). On submission, these must be fully formed scholarly papers or creative artefacts/excerpts. 

Best Academic Postgraduate Paper

Prize: $250 cash prize.                                                
Eligible: Scholarly stream 2025 conference papers.
Criteria: Clarity, originality, significance and approach.

On submission, this must be a fully formed scholarly paper.

Best Creative/Hybrid Postgraduate Paper

Prize: $250 cash prize.                                                
Eligible: Creative stream 2025 conference papers.
Criteria: Clarity, originality, shape and approach.

On submission, this must be a fully formed creative artefact/excerpt.

Submission details

2026 submission details are forthcoming.

2025 AAWP Conference Postgraduate Paper Prize Results

Scholarly Stream

Winner: Sarah Mould for ‘Writing the ebb and flow of a fat body in water’

Judge Dr Ariella Van Luyn writes:
Sarah Mould’s ‘Writing the ebb and flow of a fat body in water’ is this year’s winner. This paper addresses a significant omission in contemporary science fiction: the depiction of fat bodies in future settings. Drawing on literature at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, and insights from practice-led research and interviews with fat participants, Mould compellingly argues for the need for ‘fat hope’, an adaptation of queer theorist Muñoz. The inclusion of the participants’ voices interwoven with theory offers new insights into how swimming and beach culture can be refined as inclusive and liberatory.

Creative/Hybrid Stream

Winner: Angela Glindemann, Anastasia Baka, and Cathy Petőcz for ‘A Minor Gesture Towards Future (un)methodologies…’.

Judge Dr David Drayton writes:
All submissions for the prize this year presented exciting and original ideas and scholarship around the act of writing, and there was more in common than just the quality and energy of the papers. Concepts like collaboration, time, death and writing from/through life were explored in varied and novel ways across the submissions.

The winning paper, “A minor gesture towards future (un)methodologies: Performing creative writing research through prefixes of negation”, a collaborative effort, is generous in its honesty regarding the experience of pursuing Higher Degree Research and the frictions between art and academy, committed to exhibiting what it exposits, and poetic in its expression. It is generative, too, and points to the way patience, collaboration and community can open new modes of scholarly and creative inquiry.

Past winners

  • 2024
    • Scholarly: ‘Footsteps and Corridors—unsilencing the asylum gene: A Mad Studies, history and creative practice approach to memorialising the fragmented histories of the Ballarat Asylum’ by Kendrea Rhodes
    • Creative: ‘Awakening the Minotaur: Exploring the Interplay Between Personal Experience, Creative Decisions, and Aphantasia in Life Writing’ by Karen Martin
  • 2023
    • Scholarly: ‘Triple threat: (Screen)writing queer adaptions in the academy’ by Dante DeBono
    • Creative: ‘Tacit: an invitation to discourse (performance)’ by Bethany Evans
  • 2022
    • Scholarly: ‘Trauma-Informed Editing Practice: A Framework’ by Camilla Cripps
    • Creative: ‘The Many Homes of Home: Slow Lessons in Urgent Times’ by Julie Vulcan
  • 2021 – Online symposium: no prizes awarded this year.
  • 2020
    • Scholarly: ‘Writing on Thresholds: ekphrasis, collaboration, and threshold poetics’ by Molly Murn (Flinders University)
      • Runners-up: ‘Alternating Narration and Communal Mode in Unnatural Feminist Narrative’ by Alberta Natasia Adji (Edith Cowa​n University) and ‘Escape from the Moskoe-strom: Disrupting the whirlpool of shame to restore connection’ by Elizabeth Bellamy (University of Canberra)
    • Creative: ‘Strewn Scrabble Letters: exploring the writerly self and grieving self in grief memoir’ by Marina Deller-Evans (Flinders University)
      • Runners-up: ‘Fractured futures, distant visions:  reckoning with a dis-connective creative writing process’ by Heather McGinn (University of South Australia) and ‘Rising Tides, Rising Intuition: On the Necessity of Poetry Now More than Ever, A Metatextual Hybrid Essay in Four Parts’ by Kimberly K. Williams (University of Canberra)

Past AAWP Postgraduate Prizes

In past years, the Postgraduate Prize for most outstanding conference paper was open to postgraduate participants in the AAWP annual conference. It aimed to encourage and reward excellence in research and scholarship in creative writing, and papers were ranked according to the following criteria: clarity of the research question; significance of the inquiry; originality in thought and approach; appropriateness of the writing style. Prizes totalled $400, and the winner was offered the opportunity to co-edit the conference proceedings.

CREATIVE PAPER

PAST WINNERS:

2016: Rowena Lennox (University of Technology Sydney) ‘Coolooloi’ 2015: Amelia Walker (University of South Australia) ‘“I” has to give: Rethinking Bloom’s apophrades and/as ghostly Derridean gifts’

HIGHLY COMMENDED:

2016: Caitlin Malling (University of Sydney) ‘Spending a Month with William Stafford in Oregon’

CRITICAL PAPER

PAST WINNERS:

2016: Rachel Franks (University of Sydney) ‘Stealing stories: Punishment, profit and the Ordinary of Newgate’ 2015: Amelia Walker (University of South Australia) ‘Re-Collecting the Self as An o/Other: Creative writing research matters’ 2014: Lisa Smithies (Melbourne University) ‘Playing with Gaps: Cognitive Science and the Creative Writer’. Extract from judges’ comments: a balanced, generous and memorable piece of writing.

HIGHLY COMMENDED:

2016: Jason Nahrung’s (University of Queensland) ‘Stolen Futures: The Anthropocene in Australian science fiction mosaic novels’ 2015: Caitlin Maling (Sydney University) ‘Collage and ecopoetry in Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses’ 2014: Shari Kocher (Melbourne University) ‘Flying into the eye of the volcano: Dickinson’s volcano imagery in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red’. Extract from judges’ comments: This paper is extremely erudite. It weaves fine threads with a poised hand. Click here for information about the next Annual Conference Any questions about our prizes? Email prizes@aawp.org.au