Jolley Prize

At the fellowship lunch after our AA meeting, I’d hear him describing an afternoon sky in Paris, a shaft of shadow on a Tuscany hill. His flat unstoppable narrative was better suited to rambling American suburbs than Europe’s concise landscapes. In the tiny restaurant, we shoved four wobbly tables together, ordered Asian greens, and sat for hours fiddling with our chopsticks and drinking burnt-orange-coloured Thai iced tea. No one but M. talked and no one listened to him. His nervous and joyless verbal traverses were the out-loud equivalent of knee-shaking or leg-swinging. I’d hear occasional individual words: dusk, kindness, playful, accoutrements, heavenly. Make it stop, make it stop, I’d pray (I’d learned to pray in AA), watching his mouth move evenly and continuously like a machine in a factory, punching hole after hole in my day.

In the airless beige office she finds ways to kill time. She spins in her taupe chair until she feels faintly nauseous. She flicks through the papers in the greyish filing cabinet. She kicks the nude heel off her left foot and wedges its leather between her big toe and second-biggest toe. She cradles the putty-coloured phone in her elbow and coos to it like it’s a baby, feeling its plastic coldness. Through the half-open blinds, she stares at the signs for other businesses, reading their names out loud. First with an Aussie accent. Then a British one. Affordable Massage. Life Thrift. MRIs R Us. Poke Town. Inlet Market. Peat Bog Tanning. The Dark Fowl.

The baby had no name because they couldn’t agree on one. She was twenty-nine, and he was thirty-two, and they were going nowhere, but she fell pregnant. And she thought this might be somewhere she wanted to go with him. Only when it happened did she become aware of this urge, like the unfurling of a moonflower. Some process had taken place inside her in the dark, and much later she saw herself in the light, and knew: This is who I am. But Jack noticed none of this. The baby woke every night – wanting to be fed, held, changed, rocked, carried to the broad sash of sky at the window, all the things any newborn wants – and Jack dragged a blanket to the living room, leaving Mara in the bedroom with the baby. In the morning, Jack would shrug his shoulders: ‘You know I have to be alert for work.’

The Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,310 entries. Of these, 413 came from overseas, attesting to the high regard in which the Jolley Prize – one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished story in English –is held internationally.

Our three judges – Patrick Flanery (Adelaide), Melinda Harvey (Melbourne), and Susan Midalia (Perth) – longlisted thirteen stories from twelve different writers (John Kinsella doubled up). These are all listed on our website, and we congratulate the longlisted authors.

In this week’s ABR podcast we feature one of the winners of the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’ was joint winner of the prize that year with Carrie Tiffany’s ‘Before He Left the Family’. Gregory Day commented at the time that ‘the short story form encourages an intense display of the writer’s craft whilst being a potent vehicle for the compression of emotion’. Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and composer from the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria. Listen to Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’, published in the October 2011 issue of ABR.

In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast we revisit Cate Kennedy’s short story ‘Sleepers’, which won second prize in the 2010 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Sleepers’ was also included in Kennedy’s 2012 short-story collection Like a House on Fire. Cate Kennedy is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Listen to Cate Kennedy’s ‘Sleepers’.

The 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize has now closed for entries and judging is underway. 

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction, is now open and closes on April 24, with total prize money of $12,500. In this week’s ABR Podcast, we feature Maria Takolander’s story ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’, which won ABR’s short story competition in 2010, the year before it was renamed the Jolley Prize. It is one of the best-read features on ABR’s website, which hosts content going back to 1978. ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’ is an artful take on academic intrigue and absurdism. Maria Takolander’s story appeared in the December 2010–January 2011 issue of ABR. Listen to Maria Takolander reading her story thirteen years later.

This week we feature the 2013 winner of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world's leading prizes for a short story written in English. Michelle Michau-Crawford’s ‘Leaving Elvis’ is a story about regret and unlikely heroes, which has ‘echoes of the distinctive elements of Elizabeth Jolley’s own fiction’, according to the 2013 Jolley Prize judges. The 2023 Jolley Prize is currently open for entries. Listen to Michelle Michau-Crawford, a Western Australian writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, read 'Leaving Elvis'.