Calibre Prize
Six hours, forty-six minutes.
The pharmacy counter at my neighborhood Walgreens opened at 9 am, a full hour later than the rest of the store. I should have known that. When I was sixteen, I worked behind a Walgreens pharmacy counter just like this one, deciphering physicians’ cryptic shorthand and counting pills and holding on the phone with insurance companies and getting yelled at by sexually frustrated men refilling Viagra scripts. I lived and died by that clock.
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Calibre Essay Prize
Jeanette Mrozinski – an MFA candidate in non-fiction at Washington University in St Louis – has won the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize. Her essay, ‘Eucharist’, is the propulsive story of a bureaucrat and part-time sex worker chasing down life-saving medication and of the nameless saints who come to her aid. Ms Mrozinski becomes the first American to win the Calibre Prize, now in its nineteenth year and long established as one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished essay.
The judges – Georgina Arnott (Editor and CEO of ABR), Theodore Ell (2021 Calibre Prize winner), and Geordie Williamson (writer-publisher and Deputy Chair of ABR) – chose ‘Eucharist’ from a field of 648 entries from twenty-six countries. Here is their comment on Jeanette Mrozinski’s essay:
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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 ...
