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 Now in its nineteenth year, the Calibre Essay Prize is well established as one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished essay.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.
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ABR thanks founding Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan for their continuing support for the Calibre Essay Prize.
