Calibre Prize
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To obliterate a mountain, one must first drill a series of holes 2.4 metres deep – in either a square or diagonal pattern, depending on the rock type and face condition. A crew moves in to load the holes with blasting agent, typically a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Detonators and boosters are laid and an explosive cord is run over the mountain face. A fuse is lit. It explodes the detonator, which explodes the cord, which explodes the boosters, which explodes the blast mix, which in turn explodes the mountain.
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With the publication of the May issue, ABR was delighted to announce the winner of the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Tracey Slaughter – from Aotearoa New Zealand – has become the first overseas writer to claim the Calibre Prize with her essay ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’. We are thrilled Tracey Slaughter could join the ABR Podcast to read her winning essay. Listen to Tracey Slaughter with ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’, published in the May issue of ABR.
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I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.
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Calibre Essay Prize
Tracey Slaughter – a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand – has won the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be familiar to ABR readers: she was runner-up in the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Overseas writers have been shortlisted for Calibre in the past, but Tracey becomes the first to claim first prize.
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We woke early that morning as the sun lit up the two shared bedrooms, three of us in each one. The thin, printed cotton curtains were no match for that kind of light. We were eighteen years old. It was the first weekend of our first semester at university, and we had come to the beach house armed with our readers and highlighters.
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Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of Australian Book Review. She complet ...
Georgina Arnott has been Assistant Editor at Australi ...
In this week’s ABR podcast we hear from the runner-up of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize, Bridget Vincent. Calibre judges Yves Rees, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox praised Bridget Vincent’s ‘Child Adjacent’ for its wryness and compassion. They noted that it broadened our understanding of the family and interrogated the terrors and moral dilemmas of raising children in the climate crisis. Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Listen to her reading ‘Child Adjacent’, published in the June issue of ABR.
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I feel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.
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