The Peter Carey Short Story Award is excited to announce its longlist for 2025.
Into our ninth year, we were thrilled to receive close to 300 stories from writers Australia-wide after opening for entries in February. Our stellar longlisting panel (Brooke Dunnell, Eugen Bacon, Gillian Hagenus) faced the difficult job of narrowing that submission pool to just a small number of standout entries.
Please be advised of the panel’s selection of a longlist of 15 stories:
Afterwares ~ Greg Foyster
Body Pillow ~ Jane O’Sullivan
City of Light ~ Rebecca Burton
DannyFly ~ Jacqueline Hodder
Hands ~ Allee Richards
Looking for Steve ~ Kathryn Goldie
Lunar Eclipse ~ Lachlan Plain
Lymets! ~ Hugo Mathers
Pulau Berhala ~ Omar Musa
The Book of Empirical Observations ~ Amanda Hildebrandt
The Last Days of the Dogwalking Coven of the Inner West ~ Amalia Stone
The Mizzling ~ Gillian Marsden
The Push ~ Andrew Drummond
We Won Tickets to the Waterpark in a Radio Contest ~ Jamie Castellas
Well Past Milking Hour ~ Patrick Eades
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 14 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 send a heartfelt thank you to the many writers who submitted work, and to wish the finalists the very best of luck. Our head judge, Andrew Roff – a previous winner of the Peter Carey Short Story Award and author of the story collection The Teeth of a Slow Machine – has commenced his deliberation on the longlist.
The 2025 Peter Carey Short Story Award Committee
Longlisted entries in 2025 will be judged by Andrew Roff.
Andrew Roff is a writer living on the unceded Country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. He is a former Peter Carey Short Story Award winner, and his debut short story collection, The Teeth of a Slow Machine, is published by Wakefield Press. His first novel, Pangea, is due to be published in 2025.
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.
Eugen Bacon
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. 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’. She was the 2024 recipient of the Hedberg Writer-in-Residence Fellowship. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
Brooke Dunnell
Brooke Dunnell is a Boorloo/Perth-based writer whose short fiction has been published widely in journals and anthologies. Her collection of stories, Female(s and) Dogs, was a finalist for the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2020 and shortlisted for the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize in 2021. The unpublished manuscript of her novel The Glass House won the Fogarty Literary Award in 2021 and was published in 2022 by Fremantle Press. Brooke has helped to judge a range of creative writing competitions, including the WA Premier's Book Awards, the City of Armadale Writers Awards and the Katharine Susannah Pritchard Short Fiction Competition. Her latest novel, Last Best Chance, was released in April 2024.
Image credit: Jess Gately
Gillian Hagenus
Gillian Hagenus is a writer, editor, and literary festival organiser living and working on Kaurna land in South Australia. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide and her Gothic short fiction has won or been short-listed for various short story prizes and published in literary journals across Australia. She is the editor of Strangely Enough, a collection of uncanny short stories from emerging and established writers across Australia and her unpublished manuscript of collected short stories was awarded the AAWP/UWA Publishing Chapter One Prize. Gillian considers herself to be short fiction's pageant mum - she has worked as an organiser and programme coordinator of the Australian Short Story Festival since 2021 and so far shows no signs of "calming down".
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 short story collection Shirl was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and was published by Affirm Press in 2020. His debut novel, Henry Goes Bush, will be published by Picador in 2026. He is the co-founder of the Peter Carey Short Story Award.
