Winner:
‘Banks of Iceland’ by Craig Cormick
Judge’s Report:
I started this submission assuming that it would be focusing on the GFC and Iceland’s response to banks, so it was a surprise – a pleasant one – to find myself instead in a narrative that straddles centuries and shifts the notion of linear time to a more Tralfamadorian logic. The use of Australian idiom, and the easy conversations between narrator and Banks, work well to puncture any pomposity or overly scholarly discourse that could have dominated this work. It is identified in the synopsis as a concatenation of memoir, essay, travelogue, contemplation, and imagination, which means the reader is kept slightly off kilter, but in a way that generates – in me at least – a willingness to suspend disbelief and see what the narrative takes me.
Second Place:
‘The School House’ by Nigel Featherstone
Third Place:
‘As with everything else the end eventually comes’ by Daniel Juckes
Highly Commended:
‘Where do we start?’ by Sarah St Vincent Welch
‘Lorikeet in the Jacaranda’ by Lucy Durneen
Winner:
‘Walking across a sinkhole and trying not to fall in’ by Keeley Zappia
Judges’ Report:
From the first line, ‘Walking across a sink hole and trying not to fall in’ engaged us with its restrained yet expansive prose. Its pithy one-liners – such as ‘Mama looked so beautiful kneeling over dad in her lace. I hope she lets me wear that dress someday.’ and the repeated refrain of ‘In our next life, I want to own nothing.’ – drip with stark lyricism, bluntly depicting the brutal contradictions of generational grief and mother/daughter love, yearning to be unburdened of possessions while clinging to hope. It left us with a powerful sense of the emptiness it speaks to, both heartbreaking in its reality and unsentimental in affectation. ‘Walking across a sink hole and trying not to fall in’ has been selected as the winner of the 2026 AAWP & Express Media Sudden Writing Prize because it knows exactly the spiritual wasteland it wants to take us to and then goes there, without comfort or apology, with every well-placed word.
Second Place:
‘The Cold Sleep’ by Libby Broome
Third Place:
‘Dirt and Danube’ by Blue Jordan
Highly Commended:
‘Elegy For a Fig Wasp’ by Chloe Ho
‘My Father’s Hands’ by Nimrada Silva
‘My Name Means Soup in Chinese (But You Already Know)’ by Sophie Tong
Winner:
‘Suicide-I or: Autocide’ by Daniel Ray
Judges’ Report:
This essay is formally bold and intellectually restless. The obsessive first person becomes both method and subject, producing a genuinely unstable, questioning account of selfhood rather than a resolved autobiographical narrative. The readings of authors such as Walser and Agamben complement what the author implies are their own collection of ‘small ruins’, held together in ways that bring nuance, intellect and humour to a deeply important subject. It’s this dextrous and developed layering that perhaps moved ‘Suicide-I or: Autocide’ to the top of the pile; the work is a combination of daring, insight, confession, subversion and critique. It is a very worthy winner of the 2026 AAWP/Westerly Life Writing Prize.
Second Place:
‘Relationships of Braille’ by Amanda Tink
Third Place:
‘Geographical’ by Leila Riley Wright
Highly Commended:
‘Snow Country / A Death Haibun’ by Ana Louisa Davis
Shortlisted:
‘Propositions on Hands’ by Jeffrey-Michael Kane
‘When Fever Wings Towards Us’ by Madelaine Dickie
‘A World to Come’ by Oscar Davis
‘King of the Dirt’ by Rose Bishop
‘Canis Major’ by Libby Broome
‘Pattern’ by Angela Edward
Winner:
‘Fled is that Music’ by G. J. Johnson
Judges’ Report:
Employing a structure broadly analogous to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus 109, Fled is that Music is a highly engaging narrative about a musical prodigy’s relationship with her parents, teachers, peers, her piano and music itself. It reveals the various, sometimes conflicting tensions she encounters in trying to accommodate these different relationships while maintaining a sense of personal integrity and achieving self-actualisation. With a compelling immediacy, this excerpt from the longer work dramatises the kinds of pressures at work in her life and reveals the enmeshed and troubling issues she is obliged to confront.
Highly Commended:
‘In the Keeping of Women’ by Meagan Neil
Shortlisted:
‘Rotten Fruits’ by Elaine Chennatt
Winner:
‘Cuerdas’ by Lilit Thwaites
Judge’s Report:
There were only 7 entries in the Translation Prize this year, with one entry being an auto-translation. Languages ranged from Spanish to Italian, Polish and Filipino. The three translations from the Spanish language stood out for their professionalism concerning both the English rendition of the original and the sophistication of the translator’s statement. Access to the original was provided.
Since my first forays into literary translation, some thirty-five years ago, my approach has changed—I’d like to think it has evolved! Judging competitions such as this one made me re-think my original approach. So has collaborating with the author.
A good translator is an author’s closest reader. This helps explain why translation has been one of the great apprenticeships for poets down through the ages, and no less today. By reading closely and with productive purpose in mind, one comes to an intimate understanding of how a text works. By understanding the intimate workings of a text, one gets an idea of how such a text can be made. The fact that one works in or into another language, another mindset, to make a new artifact, guarantees that the process is, to the extent that it succeeds, more than merely imitative. Making a new artifact, be it a poem, a short-story or a novel, from any kind of other-language model, must be a creative act, if the act has any value at all. The production of a successful translation necessarily entails reading with particular strategies in mind; one reads with a view to enabling carrying across cultures, ideas and images, rhythms and cadences, tone and emphasis, ambiguity and ambivalence, conviction and meaning. No one reads more closely than the good translator because no one has more exacting task, that of ghosting oneself across language at large.
The excerpts from “Cuerdas”, “Lerna” and “Earth’s Eleventh Application for Admission to the Milky Way Confederation of Intelligent Civilisations Turned Down” exemplify what I mean by a “good translation”. The translators’ accompanying statement is testimony to a close reading that honours the author’s design, artistry and significance. They throw light on the complexity of the writing at stake and the challenges this poses for them as translators as creators in their own right.
Highly Commended:
‘Lerna’ by Lilit Thwaites
‘Earth’s Eleventh Application for Admission to the Milky Way Confederation of Intelligent Civilisations Turned Down’ by Mario Martin
‘Waiting Area’ by Christian Jil Benitez
‘We Won’t All Get into Paradise’ by Azja Kulpinska
Winner:
‘8’ by Yanna Papaioannou
Judge’s Report:
Reading the entries for this year’s prize was both exciting and demanding. Exciting because there were entries in a variety of genres, including the ‘classical’ short-story, experimental prose, dramatic monologue, speculative fiction and, yes, horror and boy, did I cringe in fear!
Many stories were suffused with a sense of loss, malaise, and solitude focusing attention on personal issues, at times invoking technology as the culprit in human affairs. What has been striking has not been the way that concerns in both the global and personal spheres have appeared again and again as thematic concerns, but in the stylistic approaches that have been used to communicate these. This is something that I took into account when reviewing my longlist of ten pieces, taking a break of five weeks before first reading and re-reading, ascertaining which stories stayed close to my bodymind. All things considered, I chose an experimental text as the winner.
Breath-takingly accomplished, “8” explores a whole world of human experience through the lens of mathematics, magnifying “the union of polarities” at the core of the number 8. The text is a surfeit of invention that I want to call painterly prose poem. It unfolds by accretion in divergent yet complementary directions, canvassing the concept of home in relation to identity, but “the focus keeps shifting” from the idea of belonging to love, freedom, and ultimately eternity with minute attention to language, sensorial detail and feeling.
The choice of the number 8 is brilliant: if you rotate it, you come across the mathematical symbol for the infinite: ∞. Give it substance, and you create a Möbius strip, an image the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to define the structure of the unconscious — neither inside nor outside the subject but the very twist that makes “inside” and “outside” generate as appearances. Just as the winning author uses typography to conclude “8” on both an ethical and ontological note:
Because you can’t have one
without the other.
8 always hides
Behind the I.
Highly Commended:
‘Oi’ by Conrad Head
Commended:
‘Mopping Tears for Money’ by Alice Niall
‘Such Brevity’ by Nimrada Silva
‘Everything Will Be Alright’ by Karla Portch
Winner:
‘The Knife Song’ by Kevti Desai
Judge’s Report:
There was, again, an upsurge in poetry entries this year and a marked increase in the of risk-taking submissions in stanzaic free verse. To my delight, formal experimentation spawned the best poems.
Many poets wrote of relationships and family members. Some also tackled social, religious and political issues. Others wrote succinct “story poems” about illness, grief, injustice and abuse, race and migration.
The three poems that stayed with me over the course of five weeks are “The Knife Song”, “Across the Moss Lime Seas” and “Father Poem” for inventiveness, striking imagery or poignancy of lingering grief.
There were other compelling pieces, especially “Clifftop Echo Point”, “A Suffering Sestina” and “Young Girl Like Me”. It was interesting to see the ways in which free form can be stretched and shaped to enhance the sentiment of each of these poems.
Whether grappling with the strange geographies of belonging, desire, ethics, politics, or compassion, all of these poems are publishable.
A contrapuntal poem in three voices, “The Knife Song” is the winner. Spare yet expressive, it celebrates the visceral power of poetry and its connection to the body, personal history, and the emergence of unconscious fantasies in us all. It blends myth with experience, plain diction with perverse metaphor and fateful enjambment: images that accumulate then sharpen, like a blade. One line can be as heartbreaking as a dream; in another voice it will undermine the language of prejudice, hypocrisy and violence. “The Knife Song” carves up language to explore the emotional integrity of experience and releases the power of imagery in moments of utter surprise.
Highly Commended:
‘Across the Moss Lime Seas’ by Veronica Hopkins
‘Father Poem’ by Tim Loveday
Commended:
‘Clifftop, Echo Point’ by Catherine Johnstone
‘A Suffering Sestina’ by Nimrada Silva
‘Young Girl Like Me’ by Thirangie Jayatilake