Peter Carey Short Story Award returns for 2024
Moorabool Shire Libraries and local writers Jem Tyley-Miller and Wayne Marshall are proud to announce the 2024 Peter Carey Short Story Award. Born and raised in Bacchus Marsh, Peter Carey is arguably Australia’s greatest living writer. The author of fourteen critically acclaimed novels and four works of non-fiction, Carey has won the Miles Franklin three times, and the Man Booker twice. Early in his career Carey published two short story collections of rare and startling power—The Fat Man in History and War Crimes—both of which remain, forty years on, unrivalled in their mastery of the short story form. It seems only natural to name this award after one of Moorabool’s (and Australia’s) most gifted and imaginative storytellers.
The award is for short stories between 2000 - 3000 words, and is open to all Australian residents.
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.
Submissions open Monday January 29 at 9am and close 6pm AEDT on Thursday March 14 2024. Entries will be accepted via online application only and will be judged blind, so please, no names on your work. The entry fee is $15 per story and you may enter as many times as you like. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know immediately if your piece has been accepted elsewhere. See our Terms & Conditions for further details.
The longlist will be posted on our website in May, while the winner and runner-up will be announced at an awards ceremony held at the Bacchus Marsh library on Saturday 1 June 2024 at 2pm.
Good luck to everyone.
Read the full Terms and Conditions here(PDF, 136KB)
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.
