"A short story is a literary fragment. It’s a simulation that immerses you right there. It allows you to explore the arteries of human existence through the mimetic capacity of fiction. The power of a good short story is in its flexibility, its immediacy, its intensity, its undecidability—how it leaves you to uncover its meaning." ~ Head Judge, Eugen Bacon - 2024 Peter Carey Short Story Awards
Congratulations to this years winners!.
2024 Peter Carey Short Story Award Winners
Winner: That Golden Hour ~ Andrea Pavleka
Runner Up: Achievement unlocked! Kill malware hitchhiker ~ Adam Brannigan
Highly commended: Cicada Coda Countryside ~ Tyler Mahoney
Highly commended: Switzerland ~ Chris Ames
Best Local Entry: Julianne O'Brien ~ Project Darren
Thank you to all who entered and for considering the Peter Carey Short Story Award with their writing.
The 2024 Peter Carey Short Story Award Committee.
The Peter Carey Short Story Award is delighted to announce its shortlist for 2024.
From a longlist of thirteen standout stories, our judge Eugen Bacon has had the difficult task of narrowing that to a shortlist of seven, ahead of her final verdict in June.
Eugen’s selection is as follows:
2024 Peter Carey Short Story Award Shortlist
Achievement unlocked! Kill malware hitchhiker ~ Adam Brannigan
Cicada Coda Countryside ~ Tyler Mahoney
Ghost ~ Simon Davis
Switzerland ~ Chris Ames
That Golden Hour ~ Andrea Pavleka
The Alamein Sessions ~ Amanda Hildebrandt
The Names of the Living ~ Claire Aman
The winner and runner-up will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Lerderderg Library in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, on Saturday 1 June at 2pm. The recipient of Best Local Entry will also be announced at the ceremony, along with the winners of Moorabool Young Writers’ Awards. Please follow this link to reserve a ticket as bookings are essential.
We would like to thank the many writers who submitted work to this year’s award and wish the finalists the very best of luck.
The 2024 Peter Carey Short Story Award Committee
The Peter Carey Short Story Award is excited to announce its longlist for 2024.
Opening for submissions in February, we were thrilled to receive 328 short stories from writers all across Australia. Our longlisting panel (Laurie Steed, Brooke Dunnell, and previous PCSSA winner Andrew Roff) faced the difficult job of selecting from that field only a small number of standout stories. A task made all the more challenging by the very high quality of submissions overall.
Please be advised of the panel’s selection of a longlist of 13 stories:
Achievement unlocked! Kill malware hitchhiker ~ Adam Brannigan
Agenda for the New World ~ Ben Volchok
Cicada Coda Countryside ~ Tyler Mahoney
Companion Planting ~ Vivien Stuart
Ghost ~ Simon Davis
Polly Waffle 95 ~ Abraham Theobald
Sunroom ~ Jane O’Sullivan
Switzerland ~ Chris Ames
That Golden Hour ~ Andrea Pavleka
The Alamein Sessions ~ Amanda Hildebrandt
The American Golgotha ~ Verity Borthwick
The Names of the Living ~ Claire Aman
The Swimmer ~ Fredrika Stigell
Judging for Best Local Entry is still underway, with the winner announced along with the first and second-placed stories in the general category on Saturday 1 June at an awards ceremony at the Lerderderg Library in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. Further details for this event will be announced with the posting of the shortlist later in May.
As always, we’d like to thank the many writers who submitted work to this year’s award, and to wish the finalists good luck. Our head judge, Eugen Bacon, has commenced her deliberation on the longlist.
The 2024 Peter Carey Short Story Award Committee
Longlisted entries in 2024 will be judged by Eugen Bacon.
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels and collections. She’s a British Fantasy Award winner, a Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Eugen’s creative work has appeared worldwide, including in Apex Magazine, Award Winning Australian Writing, Fantasy, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
The winning entry receives $2000, while the runner-up wins $1000. The first and second-placed stories will be published in the Spring 2024 edition of Meanjin, with digital publication to follow shortly after the awards announcement in June 2024 (pending the editorial process). Both stories will receive Meanjin’s standard contributor fee for their work.
In 2024, we will also be presenting one outstanding entry with the Moorabool Shire Libraries’ Best Local Entry Award. Writers who enter the Peter Carey Short Story Award and who live, work or study in Moorabool Shire are eligible for consideration. The winning story will receive $500.
In order to discover Australia’s best short stories, we believe it essential to have those at the top of their game judging all levels of our competition. Our longlisting judges are accomplished, amazing writers who love the short story form as much as we do.
Andrew Roff
Andrew Roff is a writer living on the unceded Country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. His debut short story collection, The Teeth of a Slow Machine, is published by Wakefield Press, and he is a past winner of the Peter Carey Short Story Award (2020), as well as the Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competition (2021) and the Margaret River Press Short Story Competition (2018).
Brooke Dunnell
Brooke Dunnell has worked as a manuscript assessor and mentor, creative writing competition judge, and workshop facilitator. She was one of Westerly’s 2023Mid-Career Fellows and has had short fiction published in journals and anthologies including Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Westerly, The Big Issue fiction edition, New Australian Fiction 2021 and New Australian Stories 2. Her short story collection Female(s and) Dogs was shortlisted for the 2020 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award and the 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her unpublished manuscript The Glass House won the Fogarty Literary Award in 2021 and was published in 2022, and her second novel, Last Best Chance, will be released through Fremantle Press in 2024.
Image credit: Jess Gately
Laurie Steed
Laurie Steed is a novelist and short story writer from Perth, Western Australia. His fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing, The Age, Meanjin, Overland, Island, Westerly, and elsewhere. His debut novel You Belong Here (Margaret River Press) was published in 2018 and shortlisted for the 2018 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. His second book, Love, Dad: Confessions of an Anxious Father, was published in 2023 with Fremantle Press. His third book, Greater City Shadows, won the 2021 Henry Handel Richardson Flagship Fellowship for Short Story Writing and was shortlisted for the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Greater City Shadows will be published with UWA Publishing in 2024.
Jem Tyley-Miller
Jem Tyley-Miller is an award-winning short story writer from regional Victoria whose stories are published in Overland, Meanjin, Scarlet Stiletto: The Fourteen Cut and other places. In 2022, Jem won the award for ‘Best Body in the Library’ Story at the Scarlet Stiletto Awards. She was also highly commended for the Affirm Press Mentorship Award with her novel manuscript Gone from My Sight. Jem is currently working on a second novel The Ledger of Abandoned Stories. An early draft of this was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award in 2021. When not writing, Jem directs extras on film sets, and co-organises the Peter Carey Short Story Award in her spare time.
Wayne Marshall
Wayne Marshall’s stories have appeared in Overland, Going Down Swinging, Kill Your Darlings, Island, Review of Australian Fiction, and other places. His short story collection Shirl (then Frontier Sport) was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and was published by Affirm Press in 2020. He is the co-founder of the Peter Carey Short Story Award.
