Carey award marks a decade of honouring Australian writers

ENTRIES are being taken for the annual Peter Carey Short Story Award, which this year celebrates a decade of recognising Australian writers.

Named in honour of Bacchus Marsh-born Carey, the award is for stories of between 2000 and 3000 words and carries prize money of $2000 for the winner and $1000 for the runner-up.

The winning entry will be published in an edition of the Overland Literary Journal and the runner-up at Overland Online.

As well as the major prizes, one entry will receive the Moorabool Shire Libraries’ Best Local Entry award.

Writers who enter the competition and who live, work or study in Moorabool Shire will be eligible to win the $500 prize.

Award submissions will close at 6pm on Thursday 12 March and can be made on the Shire’s website.

The competition is open to writers aged over 18 from anywhere in Australia.

Judging will be ‘blind’, so entries should not carry the author’s name, and writers can enter as many pieces as they wish.

A longlist will be published in May, with the winner to be announced at the Lerderderg Library, Bacchus Marsh on Saturday 13 June.

The longlist judges are established writers Laura Jean McKay, Adam Brannigan, Brooke Dunnell and Gillian Hagenus.

McKay is head judge and wrote The Animals in That Country (2020), which won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and was co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2021).

Brannigan, who placed in the Carey award in 2024, writes across various genres and has had work published in Overland, Meanjin, Meniscus and Australian and international anthologies.

Dunnell, of Perth, has had her short fiction widely published in journals and anthologies, while South Australian Hagenus is a writer, editor and literary festival organiser.

The 2025 winner was Amanda Hildebrandt for The Book of Empirical Observations and Jamie Castellas won best local entry for We Won Tickets to the Waterpark in a Radio Contest.

Andrea Pavleka won in 2024 for her entry That Golden Hour.

The award is being run in conjunction with the Moorabool Festival of Stories program, which is spread throughout the year.

The first event will be a writing workshop with Rijn Collins, the author of Fed to Red Birds, and a panel discussion with past Best Local Entry winners at the Ballan Library and Community Hub from 10am to 2pm tomorrow, Saturday 21 February.