Status: Closed for entries, winner announced.

Total Prize money: $10,000

Dates: 28 October 2024 – 28 January 2025, 11:59 pm AEST

Judges: Georgina Arnott, Theodore Ell, and Geordie Williamson

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce that Jeanette Mrozinski has won the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize for her essay, ‘Eucharist’, becoming the first American writer to win the prestigious award. Now in its nineteenth year, the Calibre Essay Prize is well established as one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished essay. Judges Georgina Arnott (new Editor and CEO of ABR), Theodore Ell (2021 Calibre winner), and Geordie Williamson (Deputy Chair of ABR) chose ‘Eucharist’ from a field of 648 entries from 26 countries. This year’s runner-up is ‘The Chirp/The Scream’, by Melbourne writer Natasha Sholl (who was also runner-up in 2024), and third prize goes to South Australia-based writer Robin Boord for ‘Consolation of Clouds’. Andra Putnis was commended for her essay ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios’. The winning essay is published today in the May issue of ABR, and the second and third-prize-winning essays will appear in the subsequent two issues.

The judges said this about Mrozinski’s winning essay:

‘Eucharist’, an essay of breathtaking emotional power and moral force, conveys a woman’s quest to obtain an anti-viral drug within seventy two hours of being raped to avert the risk of contracting HIV. As the crucial minutes tick away and our protagonist rushes to yet another pharmacy, we observe the grim realities of America’s health system for those facing hard choices around unaffordable, unattainable pharmaceuticals. The essay depicts ordinary, everyday distress in today’s America.

On winning the Calibre Essay Prize, Jeanette Mrozinski said:

Often, the working-class stories that make it into our literature are treated as outsider art, their value appraised by their shocking degrees of desperation and humiliation that, for millions, is simply the chronic dramatic tension of everyday survival. Our world is increasingly ruled by autocrats and oligarchs. We face interconnected democratic, economic, and environmental crises that transcend international borders, threatening to make life harder for us all. In this desperate hour, I am truly honoured to be selected as the first American to win the Calibre Essay Prize, and so deeply heartened to know that ABR readers are engaging with this story of individual and collective action.

The judges said this of the other prize-winning and commended essays:

Runner-up

‘The Chirp / The Scream’ by Natasha Sholl from Victoria is a controlled study of violence and its chaotic aftermath. In the way a film-maker might rewind and edit a scene, ‘The Chirp / The Scream’ performs the brilliant technical feat of replaying and revising a single experience, questioning every detail, realising what must and must not be true at every repetition, and gradually substituting the relevant facts one detail at a time – even while an unconscious insistence on the wrong version impinges on the conscious mind and the apparently correct version. All at once, this essay describes a vicious crime, recounts how the criminal was pursued, reflects on the ripples of the event decades later, and creates a dramatic tension between fact, memory and feeling.

Third place

‘Consolation of Clouds’ by Robin Boord from South Australia conveys the mystery surrounding the death of woman’s father, a pilot in the Korean War who died unexpectedly at home after a mechanical failure on a training flight. Boord writes in poetic prose that creates narrative movement through a gradual succession of images connected by the recurring motif of sliding, strange, penetrable clouds. ‘Nice cloud,’ observes an aunt as they watch a slide show of the pilot’s images. The essay hints at the troubling prospect that more happened to him than was officially recorded, but also, with great evocative skill, implies the depth of loss beneath family scenes that seem at first a picture of stoicism and good humour. Boord’s descriptions of a household of relatives cooking and catering their way out of poverty, and enjoying cloud photography on the kitchen wall, are especially poignant.

Commended

The judges commended ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios – A Family Tale’ by Andra Putnis from the Australian Capital Territory. This essay contemplates the real possibility that as the climate changes and international tensions rise, even in the Australian refuge of suburbia we may soon no longer presume ourselves safe. The essay recounts a conversation between the protagonist and her partner about how their family might survive a catastrophe, a playful thought experiment that quickly darkens. Uniquely, this essay subordinates the sense of menace to a trustful dialogue in which challenges are posed lovingly and met thoughtfully, suggesting that for all that is wrong in the world, much else remains right.

Of the overall field, the judges said:

Memoirs were strongly represented this year. The judges observed an impulse to distil baffling and traumatic change in the political and social spheres – climate change, war, imperilled democracies, the rise of right-wing populism – into terms that might reconcile overpowering historical forces with events and feelings closer to personal experience. Personal misfortune and its often-traumatic effects were present in compelling essays about illness, loss, grief, accident, and betrayal. Even in the darkest situations and the bleakest arguments, there lingered an implicit belief that in personal expression there was hope.

The personal dimension was intrinsic even to those essays in which personal experience was not a principal subject. Seldom did authors seek extreme objectivity and exclude themselves from their arguments. The essay at its best moves seamlessly between the public and private realms, between the larger world and felt experience. The essays that reached the shortlist involved their authors and invited the reader to observe the complex dance between thinking and feeling that makes good writing.

The shortlist for the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize is as follows (in alphabetical order by essayist):

Anneke Bender (USA) | ‘Tracing Threads’

Robin Boord (SA) | ‘Consolation of Clouds’ (Third)

Chris Ellinger (Vic) | ‘Inner World Supertramp’

Kate Fullagar (ACT) | ‘The Painting’

Adam Gottschalk (ACT) | ‘Empty Chairs at Full Tables’

Taralyn Honson (UK) | ‘Sick Enough’ 

Kelly Ana Morey (NZ) | ‘Biography’

Jeanette Mrozinski (USA) | ‘Eucharist’ (Winner)

Andra Putnis (ACT) | ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios’ (Commended)

Natasha Sholl (Vic) | ‘The Chirp/The Scream’ (Second)

Sarah Walker (Vic) | ‘Piscine’

Dominic Warshaw (USA) | ‘Grafting Figs’

Past winners

Click the link for more information about past winners and to read their essays.

FAQs and Terms and Conditions

Please read our Frequently Asked Questions before contacting us with queries about the Calibre Prize.

Before entering the Calibre Essay Prize, all entrants must read the Terms and Conditions.

Exclusivity

Entries may be submitted elsewhere during the judging of the Calibre Prize. If the essay(s) are longlisted by ABR, the entrant will have 24 hours to decide if they wish to withdraw their essay elsewhere or from the Calibre Prize. Exclusivity is essential for longlisted essays, and we require confirmation of such for all longlisted essays.

The overall winning essay will be published in the first half of 2025, followed by the runners-up.

Entry fees

Current ABR subscribers: $20
Standard/non subscribers: $30*

*All non-subscribers will automatically receive four-month digital access to ABR free of charge.

Entry + subscription bundles

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

Those who purchase a subscription while entering will be able to submit subsequent entries at the subscriber rate ($20).

ABR thanks founding Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan for their continuing support for the Calibre Essay Prize. 

Georgina Arnott has been Assistant Editor at Australian Book Review since 2022. She is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright (UWAP, 2016), shortlisted for the National Biography Award, Judith Wright: Selected Writings (La Trobe University Press, 2022), and numerous book chapters, essays, and articles in the field of Australian literary studies, history and biography. Georgina is a former judge of the National Biography Award (2018, 2019), an ABC Top 5 Humanities Scholar (2021), and a Rockefeller Archive Center fellow (2024).

Theodore Ell is an honorary lecturer in literature at ANU. He won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize for ‘Façades of Lebanon’, an essay about surviving the Beirut port explosion of 2020, and his memoir of revolution and crisis in Beirut, Lebanon Days, was published in July 2024. His poetry collection Beginning in Sight shared the Anne Elder Award in 2022. Theodore's essays and poetry have been published in Australia, the UK, Italy and Lebanon. He lives in Canberra.

Geordie Williamson has worked as a critic for a quarter of a century. He won the Pascall prize for arts criticism, edited Best Australian Essays, published a book, The Burning Library, on neglected figures from Ozlit, edited Tasmania's Island magazine, and has been Chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008. Latterly he has worked as a publisher at Pan Macmillan, where he mainly concentrates on the Picador imprint. He has two books of his own forthcoming: a monograph on Alexis Wright for Black Inc.'s Writers on Writers series, and a work of non-fiction about his Scottish family's long association with Easter Island.

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce the shortlisted authors of this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize: Kerry Greer, Shelley Stenhouse, and Jill Van Epps. The winner will be announced at Gleebooks on Thursday, 15 August, and will receive $6,000

The 2024 Jolley Prize was judged by Patrick Flanery (SA), Melinda Harvey (Vic) and Susan Midalia (WA). The judges’ report, as well as the full longlist, can be found below. 

Each of the shortlisted stories are published in the 2024 August issue (purchase single issues here). ABR extends a warm congratulations to Kerry Greer, Shelley Stenhouse, and Jill Van Epps, as well as to the longlisted entrants. Thank you to all who entered this year’s prize. We look forward to receiving your entries next year. 

Shortlisted

Kerry Greer
for ‘First Snow’

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.

Shortlisted

Shelley Stenhouse
for ‘M.’

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).

Shortlisted

Jill Van Epps
for ‘Pornwald’

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.

Full longlist

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

Judges’ comments

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 shortlisted stories negotiate the challenges of the form by skilfully combining brevity and depth, economy and resonance, offering refreshing perspectives on the world.

‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer

‘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

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.

‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps

‘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?

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. We congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted authors.

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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