This page presents creative writing opportunities created by the AAWP and our partners.
More, non-AAWP, prizes and activities can be found on the News thread.

The Prizes and Partnerships Portfolio is managed by AAWP President | Chair, Associate Professor Julia Prendergast, contactable directly at jprendergast@swin.edu.au

Got a question? Want to be on our focused Prizes email list? Email us at prizes@aawp.org.au

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

AAWP/SPINELESS WONDERS NOVELLA PRIZE

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 Spineless Wonders publishing (SW) ‘Novella Prize’ for your chance to win.

If you win you will receive: a judges’ report from an established literary author. 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 (December 2025) 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 SW: https://shortaustralianstories.com.au/

Take advantage of this stunning opportunity. Fast track your writing journey in a fiercely competitive market.

Read the full terms of entry here

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

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

AAWP/WESTERLY MAGAZINE LIFE WRITING PRIZE

In 2025, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) and Westerly Magazine once again offers 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 $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. 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

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

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

AAWP/EXPRESS MEDIA SUDDEN WRITING PRIZE

We are deeply interested in capturing a composite “picture” of what people are writing about. Now. We invite creative work—short-short fiction, “sudden” fiction, “sketchy” stories, creative nonfiction, poetry, as well as hybrid forms.

We accept 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.

The winner receives $500, their work published on the Express Media website and a Voiceworks subscription, and a one-year membership to the AAWP.

Read the full terms of entry here

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

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

‘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.

AAWP X UWRF TRANSLATORS’ PRIZE

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 prize includes a ticket to the UWRF and accommodation for the duration of the festival. The winner also receives one year’s membership to the AAWP, fully subsidised conference fees for the AAWP’s annual conference in November, and will be considered for publication by the editors of Meniscus! Entries must be no more than 30 lines (poetry) or 3000 words (prose), and entrants can translate their own work into English. Entries must be accompanied by a ‘Translator’s Statement of Intention’ (up to 400 words) addressing the aims of the translation.

Read the full terms of entry here

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

Publication News

Twice winner of the AAWP and UWRF Translators’ Prize, Alison Entrekin’s translation of Great Sertão: Meanderings by João Guimarães Rosa will be published by Simon and Schuster under its alternate title, Vastlands: The Crossing, in 2026. This edition includes Entrekin’s winning entry for the 2022 prize.

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. 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 entitled Beyond Boundaries in 2023. Her translations of Tamil literary works have been published in international journals and magazines. Thila’s translation entry was shortlisted in the 2023 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Thila received the 2024 ALTA/SALT Mentorship in Poetry from a South Asian language.

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

AAWP X UWRF EMERGING WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR PROSE

This prize is offered in partnership with the UBUD Writers and Readers Festival, and is aimed at emerging writers of short fiction. The prize includes a festival ticket to the UWRF and accommodation for the duration of the festival. The winner also receives one year’s membership to the AAWP, fully subsidised conference fees for the AAWP’s annual conference in November, and will be considered for publication by the editors of Meniscus literary journal.

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

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

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

AAWP X UWRF EMERGING WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR POETRY

Enter your poem in the ‘AAWP/UWRF Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers’ for your chance to win.

If you win you will receive: a festival pass to Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) and accommodation for the duration of the festival (*Terms and Conditions apply, see below). In addition, you will receive a one-year annual membership to the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) and 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

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

2025 Winner: ‘Before the Rise’ – Edward Kus

Author Bio
Poetry is a way Ed 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.

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

CHAPTER ONE PRIZE

This prize is offered in partnership with University of Western Australia Publishing (UWAP), and is aimed at emerging writers. If you have written a poetry collection, literary novel, short story collection, or a hybrid, genre-crossing work, then you could win a $500 cash prize, alongside fully subsidised conference fees for the AAWP’s annual conference. You will also receive a written appraisal of your work from an established literary author and a letter of recommendation to UWAP, which will see your manuscript assessed without delay (and could even lead to a publishing contract)!

Eligible emerging writers are invited to submit one chapter (or 5,000 words) from a literary novel, short story collection, or a hybrid work that crosses genre boundaries. Alternatively, they may submit up to 50 lines of poetry from a larger poetry collection.

You must be an AAWP member, and you may enter as many times as you like.

Read the full terms of entry here

Entries have closed for the 2025 prize

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 Woodlan d
2017 Winner – Joshua Kemp
2017 Highly Commended – Melanie Pryor
2016 Winner – Ruby Todd
2015 Winner – Luke Johnson

PAST PRIZES

AAWP SLOW CANOE CREATIVE NONFICTION PRIZE

This prize was offered in partnership with Slow Canoe Live Journal (SC), and was aimed at emerging writers of creative nonfiction, whether essay, profile, memoir, article, or hybrid. The prize included a $500 cash prize and fully subsidised fees for the AAWP’s annual conference in November, as well as the opportunity to participate in—and to be considered for publication by—SC! Entries were not to exceed 3000 words.

Last run in 2020.

Past Winners:

2020 Winner: ‘An incomplete archive of blue’ by Dani Netherclift
2020 Highly Commended – ‘Learning to Say Goodbye the Dublin Way’ by Breda Hertaeg
2019 Winner: ‘Marguerite Duras at the Tepid Baths’ by Anna Kate Blair
2019 Highly Commended – ‘The Price of Perfection’ by Helena Gjone

AAWP/UWRF EMERGING WRITERS’ PRIZE

In 2024, this prize became two prizes: one for prose and one for poetry. See the sections above for more details on the current AAWP X UWRF prizes.

This prize was offered in partnership with the UBUD Writers and Readers Festival, and was aimed at emerging writers of fiction and poetry, influenced by the theme of the festival. The prize included a festival ticket to the UWRF and accommodation for the duration of the festival. The winner also received one year’s membership to the AAWP, fully subsidised conference fees for the AAWP’s annual conference in November, and was considered for publication by the editors of Meniscus! Entries would not exceed 30 lines (poetry) or 3000 words (prose.

2023 Winner: ‘The Interview’ – Jake Dean
Author Bio:
Jake Dean writes stories and rides waves on Kaurna Country in South Australia. His short fiction has appeared in The Furphy Anthology, The Saturday Paper, Verandah Journal, Antithesis Journal, The Saltbush Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal and elsewhere. He won the 2021 Microflix Best Writing Award.

Second Place: The Last Sky Whale – Jacob Serena
Third Place: Rapunzel – Let Your Hair Down – Mary Winning
Highly Commended: Orang Bati – Tika Widya
Highly Commended: Kerania Versus the Dream – Vicki Kyriakakis

Judge’s Report:
Among rising sea waters and shrinking land, we look for hope to shore up from dark to light. Judging this year’s UWRF Emerging Writers’ Prize has provided some precious glimmers of hope. I have sailed beyond continents, temporalities and language borders through poetry and short stories and for this, I am grateful. I love the short form – the way it traverses both inner and outer landscapes in a limited quota of words. This year’s entries offered moments of wonder, shock and awe across experimentation, fantasy, realism, grunge, noir and lyricism.

The AAWP/UWRF award is broad in scope, and there was a fascinating variety of stories and poems this year. I had anticipated a glut of pandemic narratives but only two chose to visit that terrain. Instead, there were pieces celebrating family or friends, such as stories that sketched family dynamics, tales of migration, travel and loss, memories of childhood and those that engaged with the natural world.

Unlike past years, many submissions tap into the social and political, rather than the purely personal, many reference the current global environmental crisis in quite sophisticated ways. As was the case last year, one poem made the long list: ‘The Gecko’, which also has an environmental theme. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the cut, but would be publishable with some revisions.

All the stories are powerful, engaging and entertaining; they hold our attention and take us somewhere elsewhere – sometimes out of our comfort zone. In ‘Orang Bati’ and ‘Kerania Versus the Dream’, worlds collude, reminding us that every day necessity often triumphs over the threat of impending danger. The world of ‘Rapunzel – Let Your Hair Down’, though by far the shortest story, simmers with violence and yearning, yet light shines forth through passion and communion with the land. ‘The Last Sky Whale’, by contrast, is a tale of dislocation and grief that plays tricks with genre, time and geography; it is a philosophical tale for our times which stages Benjin-cet’s fall from the sky and its impact on two witnesses. The winning entry, ‘The Interview’, suggests a rising wave of possibility deftly adumbrated in the opening paragraph:

Gaz Garret’s Northern Rivers home was only an hour south of Burleigh. I pretended I wasn’t nervous, but as I neared his property, my arms involuntarily swung the steering wheel into the carpark of a macadamia-themed tourist castle. I sipped coffee by the window, looking towards the highway, and pulled out the folded list of questions I’d printed, which now seemed cringeworthy. ‘What has a life of surfing taught you?’ ‘Why have you eschewed the limelight?’ My eyes moved to those I’d crossed out: ‘What prompted you to disappear? What does one gain?’ I double-checked I’d brought spare batteries for my Dictaphone, and tried to remember why I’d wanted to become a surf journalist.

Though a story in realistic mode, it has surreal overtones, making us uncertain and uncomfortably self-aware. It is an accomplished piece about choice that I commend especially for its structure, imagery, tension, clipped dialogue and ambiguous ending.

I would like to thank all entrants, many of whom shared stories that were deeply personal accounts of love, loss or trauma. It was hard to choose just five, and I had to leave out many stories that were well-crafted, powerful and insightful.

Thank you.

Past Winners:

2022 – Karen McKnight: ‘This is just to say’
2021 – Soudhamini: ‘Ode to Ushas: This Time Let’s Get the Dawn Right’
2021 Highly Commended – Joshua Lee Shimmen: ‘Pups’
2021 Highly Commended – Elizabeth Walton: ‘Calcaneus’
2020 – Nina Winter: ‘Pit Stop’
2019 – Annabel Stafford: ‘Acid’
2018 – Sophie Overett: ‘Sea Wife’
2017 – Andrew Drummond: ‘Song of Shadows’
2016 – Annabel Wilson: ‘Quire’

AAWP/ASSF EMERGING WRITERS’ SHORT STORY PRIZE

This prize was offered in partnership with the Australian Short Story Festival, aimed at emerging writers across Australasia. The prize includes a ticket to the Australian Short Story Festival in Adelaide in November 2023, as well as economy airfares and accommodation for the festival, and also fully subsidised conference fees to the AAWP’s annual conference in November. The winning entry will also be considered for publication in Meniscus. Entries should be no more than 3000 words, and can be in any style or genre.

2023 Winner: ‘In Search of Murakami’ by Alicia Sometimes

Author Bio:
Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been published in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems, The Age, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Westerly and more. In 2021 she completed the Boyd Garret residency for the City of Melbourne and a Virtual Writer in Residency for Manchester City of Literature and Manchester Literature Festival. In 2023 she has received ANAT’s Synapse Artist Residency and has co-created an art installation for Science Gallery Melbourne’s upcoming exhibition, Dark Matters.

Judge’s Report:
The winner of this year’s competition is an ambitious story that declares its intentions (and literary ancestry) from the outset. In ‘Search of Murakami’ charts an intertextual course through a dreamy Japan that oscillates between detachment and intimacy, mundanity and surrealism, the concrete and the ethereal. Dialogue and description are suggestive of a nascent (or perhaps repressed is closer to the mark) reality forever threatening to tear down the delicate ego defence mechanisms which appear to be keeping the protagonist-narrator from splintering into a thousand shards of oblivion. This is the fine balance the story strikes, treading the line between too much and hardly enough, between excess and scarcity. It’s further testament to the quality of this winning story to acknowledge that either of the runner-up stories could have been awarded first place without so much as a second thought. The quality at the top was very high. At the end of the day though, this was the one that felt most fully realised. Congratulations to the winners – in fact, to all the entrants, as there wasn’t a story in there that didn’t fulfil at least one promise it seemed to be making.

Second Place: Newton’s Cradle – Lisa Moule

Third Place: Number 3606360 – Stephanie Davies

Past Winners:

2022 – ‘The True Light of Day is Constant’ by Catherine Armitage
2022 Highly Commended – ‘The Creek, Running’ by Cat Moore
2022 Highly Commended – ‘Ewe’ by Josephine Browne
2022 Highly Commended – ‘How do you lose a whole person?’ by Katy Knighton
2021 – ‘Video Capture’ by Clare Testoni
2021 Highly Commended – ‘But They Sing Gloriously’ by R. A. O’Brien
2021 Highly Commended – ‘The Group Booking’ by Michelle Prak
2020 – ‘Cockroach’ by Jane Cornes
2019 – ‘Kanreki’ by Anne Hotta
2018 – ‘Fowler’s Bay’ by Margaret Hickey
2017 – Ruth Armstrong (UTS, Sydney): ‘Paper Cranes’

Any questions about our prizes? Email prizes@aawp.org.au