The Ethel Webb Bundell Literary Award for Short Story 2024.
I acknowledge we are meeting on the unceded land of the Wadjuk People of the Noongar Nation, and I would like to pay my respects to Elders, past and present.
Thank you to the Society of Women Writers, WA for inviting me to judge the Ethel Webb Bundell Short Story Prize. Writing prizes are one of the cornerstones of a vibrant writing community. I read 72 entries in a blind judging process for the competition. In reading through the entries for the prize, I was looking not simply for a good story, well told, but originality, a freshness of expression, a story that lingered, after it was finished.
I read each entry at least once and judged each one on quality, originality and engagement. From that process I selected around twenty stories. Each of these I read several times to come up with a shortlist. I discarded entries that relied too much on cliché or punchlines, some began well but lost focus in the middle or towards the end, some were stories I didn’t feel told me anything unexpected or new, many needed more action, some felt more like excerpts from a longer work. There were several I felt were good stories that needed one or two more drafts to be ready.
The judging process becomes increasingly subjective as it progresses, so I tried to be conscious of craft as well as story when it came to choosing the winners. I found it very hard to decide particularly when it came to the first and second place and changed my mind several times. A different judge may well have made a different decision. Each of the selected stories revealed something new in subsequent readings.
There were not many entries which took advantage of the form to experiment with style, and the few that did were fresh and interesting. The winning stories all featured writing that was assured, polished and crisp. They entertained. They revealed new depths with each reading. I loved the sense of place in many of these stories, including some that weren’t shortlisted, but used evocative language and detailed settings, I found these so engaging. The winning stories were also well-edited, not such a romantic part of the writing process but it set the winners apart. Each author served the story first and foremost, in that voice, plot, setting, pace, were all consistent and tightly executed.
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