Long live the short form fiction. Not that it shows any sign of dying, in fact it is enjoying rude health from a number of highly skilled practitioners. From a long list of eleven short stories selected from over 1,200 entries across thirty-five countries first prize in the 2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize has been awarded to ‘Shelling’ by Tasmanian Tara Sharman, who at twenty-two is the youngest ever winner of the $6,000 ABR prize.
Sharman’s ‘Shelling’ follows a woman seeking to come to terms with the death of her father, driving over the course of a day and night with his abducted body – a sort of riding shotgun with a shroud.
Shelling is an assured body in the boot story from an author who is thoroughly aware of both her artistic convictions and her critical craft. The car becomes a small corner of chaos, highly compressed and highly charged, exquisitely calibrated. Of its time and timeless. A compelling read.
The judges awarded second place to ‘Sediment’ by New Zealand writer Tracey Slaughter. Slaughter, winner of the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize and runner-up in the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, is now in a category of her own as the first person to be shortlisted in all three ABR prizes. ‘Sediment’ is a story in twenty-seven points, exploring the layered histories of a woman and the house she shares with other women. Nobody passes the Bechdel Test. “In a piece of crystal there is everything that falls – shirt and shroud and bough and spit and map and lace and bone and smoke and hair and cross and ash and stain and ice and wail and dust. You keep a slice on you forever, vessel singing to the sediment.”
Third place went to Victorian writer Rachael Wenona Guy for ‘Limerence’, an experimental, illustrated story. With an opening line, How many times will I have to exhume you?,’ Limerence’ follows a teenage girl in a conservative rural town who is obsessed with the explorer John Torrington, whose body was perfectly preserved in ice.
“In the summer of 1985, aged fifteen years, I decided to draw him. Out of respect I did not depict his face – only those exquisite pallid young hands I had first encountered. I drew every little stone that surrounded his coffin, every swirl of woodgrain, the stripes, the shards of ice, pooled water, his hands, their bindings, his detached thumbnail, the buttons and linen, the spoilage, the improbability of him. I was taking this as far as I could go. I had faced calamity and survived. And now I was marching across the wastelands towards a new kind of beauty. A dead, lost boy, remade. A lost girl remaking; each brushstroke, pen-stroke, an act of revivification, a deepening entanglement. Like the forensic anthropologist who raised him from the ice, I was raising him again to raise myself. We were bright young things, improbable and sublime – we were defying erasure.”
While markedly different in style, the three winning stories are united by their engagement with grief, memory, loneliness and history – themes that Elizabeth Jolley herself often explored in her work. In a time marked by global uncertainty and a renewed reckoning with the past, the judges observed that these stories, though anchored in past events, feel urgently of the moment.
