Peter Carey Short Story Award returns for 2025
Moorabool Shire Libraries and local writers Jem Tyley-Miller and Wayne Marshall are proud to announce the 2025 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, decades 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 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.
The winning entry receives $2000, while the runner-up wins $1000. The first and second-placed stories will be published in the Spring 2025 edition of Meanjin, with digital publication to follow shortly after the awards announcement in June 2025 (pending the editorial process). Both stories will receive Meanjin’s standard contributor fee for their work.
In 2025, 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 and be published in the 2025 Moorabool Writers Craft Anthology.
Submissions open Monday January 27 at 8.30am and close 6pm AEDT on Thursday March 13 2025. 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 14 June 2025 at 2pm.
Good luck to everyone.
Submit your story here
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.
- Applicants must be 18 or over and be residents of Australia.
- To be eligible for the Best Local Entry Award, entrants must live, work or study in Moorabool Shire. When submitting your work, please select the Best Local Entry box on the entry form to be considered. The organisers have the right to request proof or residence, club membership or enrolment in a local educational facility before announcing the winner of this award.
- Moorabool Shire Council (“MSC”) staff, MSC Councillors, Peter Carey Short Story Awards (“PCSSA”) / Moorabool Young Writers Awards (“MYWA”) organisers, judges and/or their immediate family members are ineligible to enter.
- Work must be between 2000 and 3000 words.
- Please use 12pt. Times New Roman, double spaced with 2.5cm margins
- Submissions will be accepted as a doc., docx or pdf file only.
- Applications must be submitted online; hard copy submissions will not be accepted.
- Applications will be judged anonymously. Please do not include your name in the attachment.
- Entries will be independently judged. The judges' decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.
- First and second prize entries will be published in the Spring 2025 issue of Meanjin and agreement for publication is a condition of entry.
- The selected Best Local Entry will be published in the 2025 Moorabool Writers Craft Anthology and agreement for publication is a condition of entry.
- Previously published, accepted for publication by a recognised publisher, or prize-winning stories will not be accepted. (Previous online or print appearance constitutes prior publication.) (Please note: this does not include community publications, local independent publications or blogs. If your piece has been published in such a publication you are still eligible to enter the competition.)
- Entry is to be paid via the website and is $15 per story.
- Multiple entries and simultaneous submissions are fine.
- We are unable to accept entries or notify entrants that do not follow entry guidelines.