2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Entries are now closed for the 2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 and is for an original work of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words, written in English. This is the sixteenth time the Jolley Prize has run and it is one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction.

Status: Closed

Prize Money: $12,500 (first prize: $6,000, second prize: $4,000, third prize: $2,500)

Dates: Opens 10 February and closes 5 May 2025, 11:59 pm (AEST)

Judges: Julie Janson, John Kinsella, Maria Takolander 

The longlist for the 2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story is as follows (in alphabetical order by author surname):

Lachlan Alexander (Vic) | A Good Clean Death
Lorraine Carmody (New Zealand) | Alone
Catherine Chidgey (New Zealand) | Inflatable World
Sarah Day (Tas) | The Plain
Rachael Wenona Guy (Vic) | Limerence
Sharmila Jayasinghe (NSW) | List Before Sertraline
Anthony Lawrence (QL) | Live Feed
Holly Pekowsky (USA) | Work On Your Personality
Spencer Scholz (SA) | Pterosaur
Tara Sharman (Vic) | Shelling
Tracey Slaughter (New Zealand) | Sediment

The 2025 Jolley Prize longlist

‘A Good Clean Death’ by Lachlan Alexander

Lachlan Alexander lives in a small Australian town called Jan Juc on a eucalyptus-lined road with the Southern Ocean on one side and sheep paddocks on the other. His short story ‘Threads of Truth’, about how we remember the dead, was shortlisted for the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. When not writing, he runs on trails, cooks, and reads – though not all at once.

‘Alone’ by Lorraine Carmody

Lorraine Carmody is a writer from Aotearoa-New Zealand. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Massey University. Her short stories have been published in Landfall and At the Bay – I Te Kokoru and she was runner-up in the 2024 Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Competition. She has worked as a nurse and a journalist.

‘Inflatable World’ by Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey is ‘one of New Zealand’s greatest living writers’ (Radio NZ). She is the author of nine award-winning, bestselling novels, including Remote Sympathy (2020), Pet (2023), and The Axeman’s Carnival (2022). Her books are published globally and translated into several languages. She has twice been longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the United Kingdom and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Chidgey is the only person to have won the Acorn Prize for Fiction twice – her country’s most prestigious literary award. Her latest novel, The Book of Guilt, has been called ‘an emotional and intellectual tour de force’.

‘The Plain’ by Sarah Day

Sarah Day’s poem ‘The Orphan’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her books have won awards including the Queensland Premier’s and ACT poetry prizes. She has collaborated with musicians in the United Kingdom and Australia, and has judged national poetry, fiction, and nature-writing competitions. Her ninth collection, Slack Tide, (Pitt Street Poetry, 2022), was shortlisted for the Tasmanian Literary Awards.

‘Limerence’ by Rachael Wenona Guy

Rachael Wenona Guy creates writing, visual art, and performance. Her writing has appeared in numerous Australian and international journals and anthologies including Overland, Sleepers Almanac, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, and most recently Raging Grace, an anthology of collaborative writing on disability. Walleah Press published her début poetry collection, The Hungry Air, in 2020. She is currently working on a new collection of experimental poetic memoir to be published in 2026.

‘List Before Sertraline’ by Sharmila Jayasinghe

Sharmila Jayasinghe is a Sri Lankan-Australian author whose stories breathe between borders of land, language, and memory. A PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, she explores diaspora, identity, and Occidentalism through fiction and critical research. Her full-length novels Butterfly Kisses and The Untold Story of My Lover, along with her award-winning novella Brown Isn’t My Colour, weave ancestral echoes with contemporary rhythms. A former journalist with an MA in Creative Writing from Deakin University, Sharmila’s work reflects the beauty and dissonance of living in-between: past and present, home and away, self, and story.

‘Live Feed’ by Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence has published nineteen books of poems and a novel. His work has won a number of awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Philip Hodgins Medal, and the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry. He lives in Moreton Bay, Queensland.

‘Work On Your Personality’ by Holly Pekowsky

Holly Pekowsky won the John Steinbeck award for short fiction and has been published in The Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Reed Magazine. Her stories have also been finalists in several contests, including Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Arts & Letters, and Bellingham Review. Other honours include being shortlisted for The Masters Review and the Bridport Prize and longlisted for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction and LitMag’s Anton Chekhov Flash Fiction Award.

‘Pterosaur’ by Spencer Scholz

Spencer Sholz is an award-winning writer, playwright and performer living in South Australia. Having studied at the University of Ballarat Arts Academy, Spencer has gone on to work with renowned arts companies such as Australian Shakespeare Company, Red Stitch Actors Theatre, and See Saw Films, collaborating with Seam Harris, Warwick Thornton, Aunty Donna, Stuart Broad, Thomas M. Wright, and Greg Carroll. He has written and produced four new plays in the past five years under the moniker Safari Street Creative.

‘Shelling’ by Tara Sharman

Tara Sharman grew up in Tasmania/lutrawita. Her writing is deeply shaped by nature and her upbringing in the beautiful bush and sea land that is the coastal south of the island. She placed equal first in the Young Tasmanian Writers contest in 2020 and has commenced further studies in Melbourne/Naarm since then. She is twenty-two years old.

‘Sediment’ by Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has received numerous awards including the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize, The Moth Short Story Prize 2024, the Manchester Poetry Prize 2023, the Fish Short Story Prize 2020, and the Bridport Prize 2014. In 2018 her poem ‘breather’ was runner-up in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Waikato, where she edits Poetry Aotearoa. Her recent books are The Girls in the Red House are Singing (2024) and Devil’s Trumpet (2021) both from Te Herenga Waka Press, and her volume of personal essays the human dress will be published by Te Herenga Waka Press in 2026. She is currently working on another book of fiction and collaborating with Liam Hinton on a screenplay adaptation of her novella, The Longest Drink in Town.

More information

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Previous winners

Subscribers to ABR can read previous prize-winning stories to the Jolley Prize. To read these stories, click here.

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Exclusivity

Entries may be offered elsewhere during the judging of the Jolley Prize. If an entrant is longlisted and has their story accepted elsewhere, the entrant will have 24 hours to decide if they wish to withdraw their story from the Jolley Prize. Exclusivity is essential for longlisted stories to remain in contention for shortlisting.

Entry fees

Online entry (current ABR subscriber) – $20
Online entry (standard/non subscriber) – $30*

• Non-subscribers will receive digital access to ABR free of charge for four months.

Special online entry + subscription bundles

Subsequent entries may be submitted at the subscriber rate:

Online entry + 1-year digital subscription - $100
Online entry + 1-year print & digital subscription (Australia) - $130
Online entry + 1-year print & digital subscription (NZ and Asia) - $220
Online entry + 1-year print & digital subscription (Rest of World) - $240

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ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form.