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Calibre Prize

#19 Michael Adams reads 'Salt Blood'

Monday, 05 March 2018

Each year, ABR’s prestigious Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for a new essay, attracts some of the finest writers from Australia and overseas.

Last year, the first prize of $5,000 was awarded to

Tehran, April 1987: Going Under - Descending in a stream of arpeggio broken chords: as we moved through night and the vernal air down into the green earth, my mother thought she heard a children’s song on the stairs as the bombs fell cascading. Like bells, bells of Hades sounding out inverted intervals, the bombs fell interminably. The sirens that were singing sang us downward to the damp islands of the underground shelter, a honeycomb under the Tehran metropolis, buzzing with heat-maddened, with death-maddened men and women ...

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Published in August 2017, no. 393

News from the Editor's Desk - August 2017

Australian Book Review
Sunday, 23 July 2017

Jolley Prize, Fay Zwicky (1933-2017), Miles Franklin Award shortlist, Porter Prize, Conversational Calibre, Memoirs of historians, Philip Roth ...

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Published in August 2017, no. 393

News from the Editor's Desk - June-July 2017

Australian Book Review
Monday, 29 May 2017

Calibre Essay Prize

The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its eleventh year, has played a major role in the resurgence of the literary essay. This year we received almost 200 essays from fourteen countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose – who judged the Prize with Sheila Fitzpatrick (award-winn ...

2017 Calibre Essay Prize (winner): 'Salt Blood'

Michael Adams
Thursday, 25 May 2017

It is quiet and cool and dark blue. At this depth the pressure on my body is double what it is at the surface: my heartbeat has slowed, blood has started to withdraw from my extremities and move into the space my compressed lungs have created ...

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News from the Editor's desk - April 2017

Australian Book Review
Thursday, 23 March 2017

Fellowships galore

Elisabeth Holdsworth photograph by Antonio Mendes Macmillan 250

Published in April 2017, no. 390

News from the Editor's Desk - December 2016

Wednesday, 23 November 2016

CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE

For the eleventh year in a row, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. Calibre is now worth a total of $7,500. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up, $2,500. Both essays will appear in

Published in December 2016, no. 387

2016 Calibre Essay Prize winner

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Michael Winkler 280pxMichael Winkler (photograph by Chris Riordan)M

News from the Editor's Desk in the June–July issue of Australian Book Review.

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2016 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner): 'The Great Red Whale'

Michael Winkler
Monday, 23 May 2016

The history of my onomastic apprehension and misapprehension about the big thing in the middle of Australia: It is called Ayers Rock. No, it is ...

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