Prizes

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 (November 2024) 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

2024 Winner: ‘Eggshell’ – Olivia De Zilva


Author Bio
Olivia De Zilva is a writer based in Tarndanya (Adelaide, Australia). Her writing has been published in The Guardian, Mascara Literary Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Westerly, SBS and many others. Olivia’s writing has been recognised for a variety of literary awards in Australia including the Kat Muscat Fellowship, the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 prize, the Richell Prize, the Deborah Cass Award and the Express Media non-fiction prize. Olivia’s debut creative non-fiction novel will be published in 2025 by Pink Shorts Press.

Judges’ Report
The prose of Eggshell rockets along with gorgeously vibrant pace, peppered with tender wit, killer dialogue and incredible comic timing and pathos. The reader, these readers, found themselves immediately aligned with Kira, the observant, intelligent and understandably uncertain 1st person protagonist, with her gaggle of hilarious friends, who do battle with snobby racist peers, and saccharine teachers. The story is set both at home, with Kira’s Cantonese grandmother, Apoh, and at the Lonsdale Heights school, which [quote] ‘was not known for storing the brightest bulbs in the box’. Kira is an ‘eggshell’ baby, according to Apoh — white on the outside and yellow on the inside — born following her mother’s one night stand at a night club with a white man. Kira has lived with the terse but loving Apoh ever since. She has to manage the difficult task of straddling the Chinese heritage of home life, alongside the delinquency and aspirational hypocrisy of white-dominated Australian public schools in 2000s Adelaide. The work non-peevishly and joyously traverses its prickly themes of class and race with humour and astonishing grace. Reminiscent of early Alan Warner work, The sopranos, there is a deftness to the descriptions of setting and vividness of character that herald a talented writer of astute sensibility. Eggshell paints the foibles of youth and anguishes of facing an adult future, ‘without an extra million dollars in [a] bank account’ with a lightness of touch and potential for wide appeal that is rare.

Highly Commended:

My Mother Didn’t Want Me To Get A Tattoo – Kathryn Crowley
Judges’ Report:
The judges enjoyed immensely this understated, but brilliantly-handled story of a relationship between a daughter and her mother. The title, which deceptively evokes some kind of fraught or clichéd conflict with a maternal figure, conceals instead a story which transmits the nuance of intergenerational care,
difference and respect. Using original prose techniques and a play of mixed genre formats that totally engage the reader and carry them beyond tired, over-dramatised aesthetics into something that has its own voice, pacing and emotional intelligence, the work is fresh, awake and wryly kind.

The Longing – Alberta Natasia Adji
Judges’ Report:
After water, concrete has been cited as the most-used substance on the planet. The Longing is set in Java, as a small community fights a government-owned cement company trying to push them off traditional lands. It impressed the judges with its forceful anti-neoliberal politics, local embedded storytelling and cast of intelligent, engaged characters who are grappling with personal, political and familial challenges. With a gang of activist friends, Didi is a gorgeous example of a contemporary young adult trying to intervene on corruption, greed and short-sightedness, while remaining curious, driven and reflective. The work demonstrates how the novella form might deliver tight, lively narratives that our times urgently demand.

Commended:

Emotional Eaters – E Chennatt

Protest – Irma Gold

AAWP/WESTERLY MAGAZINE LIFE WRITING PRIZE

In 2024, 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

2024 Winner: ‘tiger man’ – Rose Hunter

Author Bio
Rose Hunter is the author of six books of poetry including Body Shell Girl (Spinifex Press, 2022) and glass (Five Islands Press, 2017). She has been widely published in literary journals in Australia, the USA, and Canada, and has been awarded an Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia) grant. She has also been published at the ABC and has been a guest on the ABC’s Radio National. Rose was born in Australia and lived in Canada for ten years, then Mexico for ten more. She currently lives in Brisbane/Meanjin.

Judges’ Report
This piece is fascinating in its movement and offers via its dynamic form a powerful sense of uncertainty and instability in the representation of lived experience. This metapoetic capacity is balanced and enhanced by the reader’s growing comprehension of a central narrative forming within the imagistic engagement with its subject. This is masterfully managed, bringing the piece slowly into a cohesion, which belies the frenetic energy of the competing voices and its movement across the page. As a note clarifies, the work captures the experience of working for an alcoholic multimillionaire in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. But the tangible sense of exactly who the titular ‘tiger man’ is feels somewhat beside the point by the time we come to this confirmation. Instead, the impact of the piece lies in its ambiguity, and in the sense of the encounter as simultaneously specific and universal – we all recognise the tiger man. In the same way, the piece captures both a moment in time and suggests via its fragments the expansiveness of temporality, with snippets of dialogue and small details in observation resonating in the past tense as memory. The emotional scope of the work is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the piece as a whole, oscillating from a simmering anxiety and tension, to a deep and expansive scorn, through to delicately human moments of recognition and pity. The central voice of the poetic persona is brilliantly rendered in drawing us through the weave of figures and characters to this gradual sense of intimacy, complex as it is! We congratulate the author on a stunning, surprising and highly enjoyable work.


Highly Commended/Honourable Mention

‘The Blue House’ – Oliver Shaw
Judges’ Report:
This piece is a subtle and intricate interrogation of family relationships, moving through its fragmented form as a means to invoke the complexity of these. Working through a history of familial interactions and circling around the loss of a beloved grandmother, it builds gradually and powerfully towards a sense of self-realisation in the protagonist but leaves its reader simultaneously with an impression of the vulnerability of this. This is raw and beautiful writing, which makes space for the reader even while it captures the specific intimacy of both love and guilt.

‘Our unmoored selves’ – Dani Netherclift
Judges’ Report:
This is a deceptively intricate piece, which builds from a seemingly innocuous opening to come to confront a series of traumatic experiences in a powerful way. Most impressive in this work is the manner in which the representation of trauma is both extended emotionally, offered to the reader, and at other points held and contemplated at something of a distance – there is a consciousness here of the untranslatable, and of the limits of linguistic expression. The writing offers nuanced references to a variety of sources that come together into a complex subtextual engagement with the lived reality, framed through the notion of the twilight cognitive state of anaesthesia. This is sophisticated and powerful both as an entry into lived experience and as a metaphor for the brain’s ability to grapple with extremity in both conscious and subconscious ways.

Commended/Shortlisted

‘藤爱 | Ache · Love’ – Myra Tham

‘Memory Ekphrasis: Your Brother, My Sister’ – Sari Smith

2024 Longlist:

‘tiger man’ – Rose Hunter
‘The Blue House’ – Oliver Shaw
‘Our unmoored selves’ – Dani Netherclift
‘藤爱 | Ache · Love’ – Myra Tham
‘Memory Ekphrasis: Your Brother, My Sister’ – Sari Smith
‘Became—Becomes’ – Gemma Nisbet
‘Anatomy of Swiss Cheese’ – Shiva Motlagh-Elbakri
‘A Message From a Dead Poet: “What I Do Is Me: For That I Came.”’ – Marlane Ainsworth
‘The Apple Falls Far From the Tree’ – Emma Andrews
‘Coming Home’ – Sallie Yea
‘Death at the Megamart’ – Harris Smart
‘Night of the Month’ – Isa Crossland Stone
‘What Remains’ – Sarah Muldoon
‘Blue-Ribbon Country’ – Melissa Bruce
‘Finding Napoleon’ – Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon
‘The Bitter and the Sweet’ – Suzanne Kamata

Past Winners:

  • 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

2024 Winner: 
‘a’ deanamh gràidh, a’ deanamh bròn’ – Eartha Davis

Author Bio
Eartha is a woman of Ngāpuhi heritage living on Wurundjeri land. She placed second in the 2022 Woorilla Poetry Prize Youth Section, was nominated for The Best of the Net Award in 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Creative Writing New Zealand’s Short Story Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in Wildness, Rabbit, takahē, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Modron, Baby Teeth Journal, Revolute, South Florida Poetry Journal, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, ELJ Editions, and Arboreal Magazine, among others. She is a poetry editor at three journals and an intern at Red Room Poetry.

Judges’ Report
We chose ‘a’ deanamh gràidh, a’ deanamh bròn’ as the winner of the 2024 AAWP Express Media Sudden Writing Prize for the sheer delight it takes in the expressive possibilities of language. We appreciated the poem’s a strong voice, formal experimentation, and wordplay. Our favourite cluster of lines demonstrates the expressive, playful nature of the voice and use of wordplay: ‘there are / birds oaring / across oceans’. As seen in this quote and throughout the poem, the imagery is evocative and often surprising: hearts are ‘asleep in their baskets’; we witness ‘two eyelids / unbuttoning / their sleep’; and lovers ‘halve / these hearts / like apples’. We commend the author for the obvious delight they take in experimenting with language, and look forward to reading more of their work.

Second Place – ‘Out West’ – Siena Bordignon

Third Place – ‘Cross by the river’ – Kobi Simpson

Shortlisted/Commended

‘The commute’ – Saanjana Kapoor

‘Behind the scenes’ – Zoe Sorenson

Past Winners:

  • 2023 – ‘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

2024 Winner
‘Informal Abstraction’ – Alison Entrekin

Translator Bio
Alison Entrekin is a prize-winning Australian literary translator from the Portuguese. She has translated many of Brazil’s most beloved works of literature, including Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, Paulo Lins’s City of God and José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree. Her students are based all over the world and get together once a week for lively literary translation classes online.

Translator Credits and Notes
Translated by Alison Entrekin and students: Joana Arari, Silvia Düssel Schiros, Cláudia S. Cruz, Nicole Soek, Sarah J. Johnson, Bianca de Oliveira, Lara Bourdin, Poliany Figueiredo, Lourenço Martins Marques, Gerson Ferracini, Anita Di Marco, Maria Jaqueline Evans, Siân Valvis, Alice B. Osti Magalhães, Alexandre Veloso de Abreu, Thomas Nerney.

Adriana Lisboa was born in Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of many widely translated novels, as well as poetry, short stories, essays, and children’s books. Her 2001 novel Symphony in White received the prestigious José Saramago Prize. Her poetry collection, Equator, was published by Poetrywala in 2019.

Second Place: Two Funerals – Thila Vargese

Third Place: The Magic Ring – Sian Valvis

Highly Commended: on the consolation of elegy – Dean Gessie

Highly Commended: A Confession to a Murder – Noora Bahar

Judge’s Report

There were only 9 entries in the Translation Prize this year, with one entry being an auto-translation and the majority of entries denoting a nostalgic bent in that they tackled long published works rather than contemporary, let alone controversial, pieces as was the case in previous years.

Although ‘Informal Abstraction’, a collaborative translation of ‘Abstração informal’ by Brazilian author Adriana Lisboa comes close to ‘Two Funerals/ Due Funerali’ by Italian author Enrico Castelnuovo, ‘Informal Abstraction’ comes first for its accurate and passionate engagement with the original from the Portuguese collection Dias de Domingo. Both translation and statement of intent for ‘Informal Abstraction’ strike me as the most sophisticated submission in this competition. The translation has style, rhythm, and does an excellent job at capturing the spirit of the original. At the same time, it is an accurate translation, which manages to get certain nuances, and offers welcome idiomaticity in English, where appropriate.

‘Two Funerals’ and the third in the short list, ‘The Magic Ring’, are also accomplished translations matching their respective aesthetic and ethical frameworks. Both are also good, accurate, translations. They respect the register and tone of the original and produce an even voice in English. I want to congratulate the highly commended entries, especially the auto translation from French to English titled ‘on the consolation of elegy’. It’s un coup de poing dans l’estomac and the poem lingered in my mind and heart as a creation/re-creation about a mother’s unbearable grief so well captured in the image of her child’s ‘point de beauté’ as what Jacques Lacan would have called the ‘point de capiton’, or anchoring point, in the French version. ‘A Confession to a Murder’, on the other hand, offers an excellent balance between conveying the form and content of the original.

Past Winners:

  • 2023 – ‘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
  • 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

2024 Festival Theme: ‘Words Shape Our Worlds’


2024 Winner: ‘Water Casting’ – Jane Crowley


Author Bio
Jane Crowley is an emerging writer on Dharawal land, having published in Overland, Antipodes and Spineless Wonders. She is completing her Masters of Creative Writing at Western Sydney University and is currently writing fiction and personal essay that explores the expression of grief in relation to home, place and solastalgia.


Second Place: ‘The Saltbush Variations’ – Linda Atkins

Third Place: ‘Halahala’ – Lee Hana

Highly Commended: ‘Survival in a Glass of Water’ – Raluca Comanelea

Highly Commended: ‘Pocketful of Poison’ – Cassandra Cook

Judge’s Report

Reading the entries for this year’s prize had me wondering should fiction reflect the times we live in? Despite the UWRF’s set theme for the forthcoming festival, many submissions were stark and despairing, filled with fear, heartbreak, loneliness and grief.

Whilst many stories were suffused with a general sense of malaise, a few stood out focusing laser-sharp attention on particular personal issues. 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 six weeks before first reading and re-reading. In consequence, I made a shortlist of the five pieces that stayed with me for that length of time and chose as winner the one that made the most emotional impact.

I checked myself a week later: was I letting a preference for the smooth run about grief concerning a mother and son in a sparse, exquisitely observed and balanced narrative through identification? No. pressed to the edge of despair, ‘Water Casting’ remained for me an empathic, understated and sharp story of palpable grief written by a son witnessing the decline of a mother afflicted with a terminal illness. I love short fiction, the way a writer can traverse both inner and outer landscapes in a fixed quota of words, giving us an open ending – ethereal and tantalising as mist rising above water. This year’s winning entry offered such a moment of wonder.

Second came ‘The Saltbush Variations’, allegedly for comical relief on my part, but effectively for mastery of time sequencing and dialogue. I chose ‘Halahala’ as third prize for its mastery of traditional narrative technique and sparseness. ‘Survival in a Glass of Water’, a cleanly written story about an illegal abortion in Romania had me on the edge of tears and I highly commend it for its crisp images. ‘Pocketful of Poison’ is noir with intricate plot and highly commended.


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

2024 Festival Theme: ‘Words Shape Our Worlds’

2024 Winner: ‘Circle Time’ – Joanne Ambrose

Author Bio
Joanne Ambrose is a Brisbane writer inspired by her travels and experiences in her home state of Queensland and further afield. Her work as a teacher and school counsellor in indigenous communities and regional areas has provided the opportunity to engage with vibrant and talented people and cultures.

Second Place: ‘After’ – Tim Loveday

Third Place: ‘The Riddle’ – Leonardo Chung

Highly Commended: ‘Bark’ – Daniel Tanure Benício

Highly Commended: ‘Learn to Ride’ – Verity Oswin

Judge’s Report

There was an upsurge in poetry entries this year and a marked increase in the quality of submissions in stanzaic free verse – short stanzas of two lines were prevalent. To my delight, formal experimentation, particularly in the area of prose poetry and hybrid forms were also represented. Although the majority of pieces tapped into the purely personal, some also tackled the social and political. The three winners represent this thematic and formal diversity.

Such has been the variety of submissions that the selection of a winner has bubbled at the back – and then front of my mind for over six consecutive weeks. The three poems that stayed with me are ‘Circle Time’ for its striking image/s, ‘After’ for the poignancy of its lingering grief and ‘Riddle’ for its interpellating urgency. There were other compelling pieces, of course, but, except for ‘Bark’, which I loved for its daring and ‘Learn to Ride’, for its humour and rhythmic qualities, the execution often felt somewhat flawed to me. So, I thought I’d give some advice to emerging poets. In poetry, less is more: work on the conciseness of lines; don’t state the obvious; avoid melodrama, clichés and mixed metaphors. Find a snappy title for your poem.

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

Enter here


2023 Winner: The Freelancer by Jonathan O’Brien

Author Bio:
Jonathan O’Brien is a writer, software developer, and housing advocate, described as “a fresh and exciting voice” by The Guardian Australia. He was the recipient of a Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship (2020), and the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award (2017). Find him at jonobri.com.

Judge’s Report:

‘The Freelancer’ is a compelling fictional excerpt that presents a fast-paced and perceptive satire of the contemporary gig economy and its values. The action is engaging, the characters are persuasively drawn, and the situations presented are skilfully realised. The writing encapsulates key hallmarks of the contemporary hustle culture in an assured and original voice, revealing how twenty-first-century freelance work and multitasking are often largely disconnected from what used to be called ‘reality’. This excerpt has real poise, possessing an inventive and acerbic sense of humour and a sophisticated self-awareness.

Second Place: The End of Experience (highly commended) – Martin Kovan
Third Place: Dear Mutzi – Tess Scholfield-Peters

Past Winners:

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 – ‘An incomplete archive of blue’ by Dani Netherclift
  • 2020 Highly Commended – ‘Learning to Say Goodbye the Dublin Way’ by Breda Hertaeg
  • 2019 –’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