Advances
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to win the Calibre Prize, now in its nineteenth year and long established as one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished essay.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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How good it was – when we presented the five shortlisted poets in this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize on February 18 – to be back at Readings Carlton, rather than speaking via Zoom. Like lockdowns, Zoom ceremonies have really outstayed their welcome.
This year’s judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose – shortlisted poems by poets Sarah Day (Tasmania), Jennifer Harrison (Victoria), Audrey Molloy and Claire Potter (both NSW), and Meredith Stricker, who lives in California. This was the first all-women shortlist in the Porter’s twenty-one-year history.
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The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its twenty-first year, attracted 1,171 entries, from twenty-nine countries. We thank our three judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose – who have shortlisted the following poems:
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In 2013, Australian Book Review broadened its review content to include the arts. Since then we have reviewed theatre, film, opera, music, dance, and the visual arts – not just literature. This development was in response to the decline of arts criticism in our newspapers and in recognition of our readers’ eclectic interests.
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ABR has had a long association with Readings, a Melbourne icon with eight stores across the city and a buoyant online shop. Readings – a regular Independent Bookseller of the Year over the years – is renowned for its customer service and the quality of its stock.
The Readings Foundation, created by Mark Rubbo in 2009, assists Victorian organisations that support the development of literacy, community integration, and the arts. Since 2009, the Readings Foundation has donated more than $2 million to organisations that support our most vulnerable people.
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Hurricanes hardly happen, Henry Higgins assures us in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe’s great musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Obviously, Alan Jay Lerner (the lyricist), never went to Florida, where hurricanes are positively ubiquitous. The coverage in our media is immense, the footage graphic, the consequences dire.
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Happy the media company that can afford to shed almost a hundred journalists without jeopardising the quality of its newspapers. That’s what Nine has done, with eighty-five journalists, many of them senior ones, taking up voluntary redundancies from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review. Among them were Jewel Topsfield, Royce Millar, Farrah Tomazin, Jack Latimore, Osman Faruqi, and Martin Boulton, as reported in the Guardian.
... (read more)Welcome to our many new subscribers who have joined us in the past couple of months, including a large number in NSW and the ACT, further evidence (if we needed it) of the value of our new partnership with the National Library of Australia. We hope you enjoy the September issue.
... (read more)On 15 August, Advances and about one hundred lovers of short fiction descended on Gleebooks in Sydney for the announcement of the winner of the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Not since January 2020 had ABR presented a prize ceremony in public. Since then, because of the exigencies of Covid-19 and pesky lockdowns, all our celebrations have happened online, and goodness knows the popularity of online events of this kind has begun to wane, like those Zoom soirées and cocktail parties we endured.
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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.
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