The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 and is for an original work of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words, written in English. This is the sixteenth time the Jolley Prize has run and it is one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction.

Status: ABR is delighted to announce the thirteen entrants longlisted for the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize.

The 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize longlist:

Ursula Brunetti | ‘Peach’
Belinda Castles | ‘Connie’
Sally Cunningham| ‘Pliable Bones’
Laura Elvery | ‘C.Q.D.’
Dean Gessie | ‘Brown Paper Bag’
Olivia Heal | ‘Nature of Offence’
Tina Huang | ‘Pale Blinking Life’
Sam Keenan | ‘Backflip’
Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan | ‘The Philosophies of Jean Paul Gaultier as Manifested in the Termites in a Chippendale Rental’
Elizabeth Morton | ‘Something in the Way’
Alison Richards | ‘Done’
Kunal Sharma | ‘Without Condition’
Jennifer Wawrzinek | ‘The Rental Ledger’

Prize Money: $12,500 (first prize: $6,000, second prize: $4,000, third prize: $2,500)

Judges: Delia Falconer, Jonathan Ricketson, and Beejay Silcox

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. 

Of the overall field, the judges had this to say:

This year’s longlist was the Jolley’s most international yet, with writers from seven countries represented in our top thirteen. But, for all their global reach, these stories felt part of the same conversation, each trying to find solid ground in an ever-shifting world. They tell stories of precarity: housing, family, climate, conflict, insecure work. And they return, again and again, to a deep and amorphous grief.

Young narrators carried so many of this year’s entries. There were characters coming of age and searching for a place to belong in stories that explored the paradoxes and insights of child logic. Alongside them was the restless presence of the more-than-human world: wakeful ghosts, lurking creatures, the ebbs and webs of ecosystems. From shipwrecks to murders, disaster often hovered just out of sight. This left many stories suspended in something fragile and febrile: before or after.

As always, the stories that stayed with us were the ones that took recurring themes and ideas somewhere wondrous and unexpected. They surprised us with their voice or their humour. They exhibited a willingness to look at the world a little sideways and have us tilt our heads too.

As we read towards a winner, one image became a touchstone in our conversations: short stories as small doorways opening into much larger worlds. We found ourselves returning to tales where the smallness of the form was the source of its expansiveness, where the world of the story – with all its questions and possibilities – kept building in our minds long after we had finished reading.