2025 Calibre Essay Prize shortlist announced
The Australian Book Review (ABR) has announced the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize shortlist.
Shortlisted essays include:
- ‘Tracing Threads’ (Anneke Bender, US)
- ‘Consolation of Clouds’ (Robin Boord, SA)
- ‘Inner World Supertramp’ (Chris Ellinger, Vic)
- ‘The Painting’ (Kate Fullagar, ACT)
- ‘Empty Chairs at Full Tables’ (Adam Gottschalk, ACT)
- ‘Sick Enough’ (Taralyn Honson, UK)
- ‘Biography’ (Kelly Ana Morey, Aotearoa NZ)
- ‘Eucharist’ (Jeanette Mrozinski, US)
- ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios’ (Andra Putnis, ACT)
- ‘The Chirp/The Scream’ (Natasha Sholl, Vic)
- ‘Piscine’ (Sarah Walker, Vic)
- ‘Grafting Figs’ (Dominic Warshaw, US).
With a cash prize of $10,000, the Calibre Essay Prize is for ‘nonfiction essays of all kinds – personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental’, with word counts ranging between 2000 and 5000 words. The winning essay will be published in the May edition of the ABR.
The ABR said that it received a record number of prize entries this year, numbering almost 650 submissions from 26 countries.
Judges for the 2025 prize include incoming ABR editor and CEO Georgina Arnott, 2021 Calibre winner Theodore Ell, and literary critic Geordie Williamson.
Discussing the shortlist, judges said: ‘The essay at its best moves seamlessly between the public and private realms, between the larger world and felt experience. The essays that reached the shortlist involved their authors and invited the reader to observe the complex dance between thinking and feeling that makes good writing.’
Last year’s winner was Aotearoa New Zealand writer Tracey Slaughter for the essay ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’.
Category: Awards Local news
