2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce that Jill Van Epps from New York is the winner of the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Judges Patrick Flanery, Melinda Harvey and Susan Midalia chose Van Epps’s story ‘Pornwald’ from an international field of about 1,300 stories. Perth-based writer Kerry Greer was placed second for her story ‘First Snow’; and Shelley Stenhouse, another New Yorker, was placed third for ‘M.’. All three shortlisted stories appeared in the August issue, which can be purchased here. 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 fifteenth time the Jolley Prize has run and it is one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction.

Status: Closed, winner announced

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

Dates: Opened 16 January and closed 22 April

Judges: Patrick Flanery (SA), Melinda Harvey (Vic) and Susan Midalia (WA)

The judges said this of the three shortlisted stories:

‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps (first place)
‘Pornwald’ is a puzzle that tests the limits of realism with an often riotously deadpan sense of humour. Characters move through a world that is superficially familiar, but as the story progresses, all may not be as it initially appears: this is an unpredictable place, wilder than the characters themselves realise. What would it mean, the story asks us to consider, if we were to wake up one day to our own unreality?

 

‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer (second place)
‘First Snow’ subtly enacts a vulnerable young woman’s decision to leave her self-absorbed, manipulative partner, the father of her baby. Contrasting her banal relationship with a poetic response to the natural world and the enchantments of motherhood, the story reminds us that traditional domestic fiction, in the hands of an intelligent, empathic writer, can render the ‘ordinary’ both psychologically complex and deeply affecting.

 

‘M’ by Shelley Stenhouse (third place)
In ‘M’, a middle-aged woman hooks up with a man whom she encounters through AA. Wittily told, this rollicking tale set in New York City is at once a character study of the garrulous oddball M and a tragicomic portrait of the narrator herself, whose compulsions and choices see her avoiding the everyday joys of her life as a mother.

The judges said this of the overall field in 2024:

There were more than 1,300 entries to this year’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which attracted writers from around the globe. The three judges were pleased to encounter a range of forms and genres, from literary realism to satire, speculative and historical fiction, dystopia, autofiction, and more experimental work. The stories explored themes of love, sex, and the pain of being alive, while many took an overtly political stance, addressing anxieties about climate change, social justice, and the rise of Artificial Intelligence. The judges gravitated towards stories marked by an inventiveness of form and a distinctiveness of voice, stories that had something surprising to tell us and found imaginative ways of expressing ideas.

The longlist for the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story is as follows (in alphabetical order by author surname):

Deborah Callaghan (NSW) | Small Details of Travel
Lily Chan (Vic) | great flying soar and in command
Rhonda Collis (Canada) | Sage
Luca Demetriadi (Vic) | Olga’s AirPod
Dan Disney (South Korea) | what a what is (an autofiction)
Laura Elvery (QLD) | Transatlantic
Kerry Greer (WA) | First Snow
John Kinsella (WA) | Accordion to Bach
John Kinsella (WA) | Falling Up Stairs
Sam Reese (UK) | Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise
Faith Shearin (USA) | Natural Disasters
Shelley Stenhouse (USA) | M.
Jill Van Epps (USA) | Pornwald

More information about the longlisted authors can be found below.

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The 2024 Jolley Prize longlist

Photograph by Tony Mott‘Small Details of Travel’ by Deborah Callaghan 

Deborah Callaghan was an interstate train stewardess, a librarian, and a freelance journalist before starting a thirty-five year publishing career, during which she was a publicist, a publisher and a literary agent. Her debut novel, The Little Clothes, was published in June this year by Penguin Books Australia and by Bedford Square Publishers in the UK in July.

‘great flying soar and in command’ by Lily Chan

Lily Chan was born in Kyoto, raised in Narrogin and resides in the western suburbs of Naarm (Melbourne). Her first book, Toyo: a memoir, was published by Black Inc. in 2012 and received the Peter Blazey Fellowship and the Dobbie Literary Award. It is a prescribed text for the HSC. Lily is working on a collection of essays on a childhood spent preparing for an apocalypse.

‘Sage’ by Rhonda Collis

Rhonda Collis is a writer based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. She has her Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has won awards and has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She has just finished a collection of stories.

‘Olga’s AirPod’ by Luca Demetriadi

Luca Demetriadi is a British/Australian writer and PhD student, currently living in Naarm (Melbourne). His research focus is independent and avant-garde Australian publishing. His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly.

Photograph by Hyejin Yivadi Studio‘what a what is (an autofiction)’ by Dan Disney

Dan Disney is based in Seoul, where he is a tenured professor with Sogang University’s English Literature program. In 2023, ‘periferal phantasma’ won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize; that poem forms part of a suite appearing in the forthcoming chapbook Thuggery, Buggery, Skullduggery Inc. (Red Letter Press, 2024).

Photograph by Trenton Porter‘Transatlantic’ by Laura Elvery

Laura Elvery is the author of two short story collections, Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter, which won the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection at the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award. Her novel about Florence Nightingale will be published in 2025. 

‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer (second place)

Kerry Greer is an Irish-Australian poet and writer. She received the Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021. Kerry has been shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and more. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Cedar Crest College. Her début poetry collection, The Sea Chest, was published by Recent Work Press in 2023.

‘Accordion to Bach’ and ‘Falling Up Stairs’ by John Kinsella

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt. His new collection of stories, Beam of Light, is due out with Transit Lounge in September (2024).

‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’ by Sam Reese

Sam Reese is a short story writer and jazz critic from Aotearoa New Zealand. His short stories have won a number of prizes and have been collected in two volumes. As a critic, he has won the Arthur Miller Center first book award, and most recently has edited the notebooks of saxophonist Sonny Rollins. He spends his time between Wellington and York, where he heads the creative writing program at York St John University.

Photograph by Kerry Stavely‘Natural Disasters’ by Faith Shearin 

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question, Telling the Bees, Orpheus, Turning, Darwin’s Daughter, and Lost Language. Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo,The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels – Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea – won The Global Fiction Prize and have been published by Leapfrog Press.

Photograph by Reuben Radding ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse (third place)

Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize (judged by Edward Hirsch). Her collection, Impunity, was published by NYQ Books. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Allen Ginsberg Award, was a National Poetry Series finalist, and had two Pushcart Prize nominations (one by Tony Hoagland). Her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Nimrod, Margie, Third Coast, Brooklyn Rail, Washington Square, and Poetry After 9/11: An anthology of New York poets (among others).

‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps (first place)

Jill Van Epps is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in visual art from Goldsmiths College in London and studied video art in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship. She was awarded the Margaret C. Annan Award for fiction and has had several poems published in journals, including The Pedestal Magazine, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Oyez Review, and Visions International. She is currently completing her first novel, Teenage Babylon.

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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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Judges

This year’s Jolley Prize was judged by Patrick Flanery, Melinda Harvey and Susan Midalia. 

Exclusivity

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

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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.