Past winners of the Woollahra Digital Literary Award

2023 Winners

2023 Woollahra Digital Literary Award: Winners 

We are very pleased to announce the winners for the 2023 Woollahra Digital Literary Award!

We were thrilled with the calibre of the 179 entries to the awards this year. 

Thank you to our judges Claudine Tinellis, Tiffany Tsao, Ali Whitelock and Brett Osmond for all their efforts as they compiled the shortlist and selected this year's winners.

Warning: Some of the winning works contain adult content and explicit language, as well as disturbing or confronting topics. Readers' discretion is advised.

Fiction Prize

Michael Mohammed Ahmad, The Life of a Folk Devil(PDF, 888KB), Meanjin 

Judge's Comments: 

“Powerful, thought-provoking and gritty, Life of a Folk Devil is a chronicle of the legacy and impact of racism. A no-holds-barred examination of multiculturalism in Australia and the resulting challenges we collectively face in representing cultural diversity with nuance. 

Reading like a memoir, this piece offers glimpses of the protagonist’s life held up against a backdrop of deeply personal, communal and global events. Events which had a profound effect on the protagonist’s sense of identity and belonging. 

Deeply moving, raw and at times uncomfortable, Life of a Folk Devil is a complex, compelling read and deserved winner of the 2023 DLA Fiction Award. ” –Claudine Tinellis

Non-Fiction Prize

Cher Tan, House Style Lifestyle, or Same. Same. Same. Same. Same. Same., Cordite Poetry Review

"Published before fears of writing’s automatisation went mainstream with the debut of ChatGPT, Cher Tan’s 2021 essay was prescient and is chillingly relevant – a brilliantly sustained and relentlessly incisive commentary on the shift in today’s writing industry away from the particularity of voice and thought towards aesthetically conformist content: 'No thoughts, just vibes.'" –Tiffany Tsao 

Poetry Prize

Dominic Symes, Security Questions (True Vulnerability), Cordite Poetry Review

“The tenderness in this poem tangles me in the web on the patio of my own past and without seeing it coming, I find myself at the bottom of the well of my own childhood looking up blinking into a distant sun. I feel the pride of the poet’s mum, in these simple, breathtakingly beautiful lines, how she spells her name - how this places her in a certain time, a certain world, a world I wish I could return to time and time again. . . .This poet’s world is my world, the personal is universal and is this not the job of the poet. . . .  

This poem offers us a precious world filled with all that any of us will ever need. It is touching and beautiful, slightly strange and stark in its brilliance. This poem pushes its specs up the bridge of its nose, looks you straight and kindly in the eye and tells you it’s okay, that everything you will ever need exists within you. Until I read this poem, I hadn't realised just how badly I needed it. It is a shimmering piece of work.” – Ali Whitelock

Digital Innovation Prize 

Adnyamathanha Community, Yurlu the Kingfisher Man, SharingStories Foundation

“It is quite stunning. I’ve read it several times now. It’s deceptively simple what they have achieved - a balance of media types and technology to propel the story into your imagination. I found it inspiring and so effective. The use of animation with the illustrations and then live footage was clever. Coupled with the audio elements and the simple packaging of these components into the flow of the pages was well done.

Reading is a magical thing. Unfortunately most people rob some of that magic from the reader when they introduce technology, but this project demonstrated how to harness it to expand your imagination, understanding and appreciation. In doing so they have created something that is more than a children’s book - it is a book that can and will be enjoyed by people of all ages.” – Brett Osmond

Readers' Choice 

Yael Grunseit, The Myth of Good Posture, Voiceworks 

The Readers' Choice Award was voted for by people in the community from the shortlist across the Digital Literary Award categories of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Digital Innovation.

The Myth of Good Posture, nominated in the Poetry category, received the most votes of all shortlisted entries. 

2023 Shortlist

Fiction Shortlist

“From short stories to novellas and full-length novels, the entries were an impressive collection of stories that spanned an array of genres, themes, voices, time-periods and settings.

As a writer, I understand the courage it takes to submit your work to competitions like this. To open yourself and your writing up to scrutiny is no easy task. So, I congratulate each and every entrant for taking that leap of faith with their submissions.” –Claudine Tinellis

Non-Fiction Shortlist

"It was incredibly difficult to come up with this list. There were many pieces in addition to these that inspired admiration, emotion, and respect; that made me perceive the world, or an aspect of the world, with new eyes; that caused my brain to tingle with unbearable excitement.

The shortlisted entries demonstrate marvellous mastery and coherence with regards to form, structure, style, and tone. And several of them exhibit subtle or overt genius in taking advantage of the digital medium in which they appear." –Tiffany Tsao

Poetry Shortlist

“This is my 3rd year judging this incredible prize, and the poems this year were again brilliant, moving, exquisitely crafted, funny, breathtaking in their originality and their ability to move the reader. They ranged from intricate graphically designed poems, to single stanza poems; from tender hymns to soil, to poems of turtles and lives gone awry.

These poems have left the pens of their writers and gone out into the world to find the hearts that need them most. They will stay with me for a long time to come.” – Ali Whitelock

Digital Innovation Shortlist

“Whilst reading in its traditional form is magical, it is inspiring to see how writers are challenging readers with technology. Mixing it up, engaging the reader in new ways and forms. It’s no longer a passive experience but can be a game or an interaction, or a workshop type of experience.  Overall, I was and am inspired by the ambition of many of the projects.” – Brett Osmond

2022 Winners

Warning: Some of the winning works include adult content and explicit language.

Fiction: Deniz Agraz, The Golden Bracelet(PDF, 118KB)

Judge's comments: The Turkish story ‘The Golden Bracelet’ is the winning story. The unique setting and hidden emotional trauma of lost relationships and baby, give the story a poignant power. Migrant experiences are important and stories that resonate with cultural richness are inspiring. I liked the combination of everyday observation of food, language and interconnections between family members. The weighing of the golden bracelet seems like a metaphor about weighing up an old life. A letting go of a past marriage and the hope for a new life.

Non-Fiction: Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn & Reina Brigette Takeuchi, Not Your Miss or Madame: A Three-Act Meditation on Love, Opera and Friendship

Judge's comments: This inventive hybrid work brings together the textual, visual, lyrical and poetic within a sophisticated interweaving of autobiography and cultural critique. Written in collaboration, the work is driven by, and articulates, the creative and radical act of friendship. The notion of friendship as resistance, politics, and play is powerfully rendered through a nonfiction that is formally various, suggestive of the possibilities and future directions of the genre, particularly in the digital space. It’s such a clever and engaging piece in its structure, its use of multiple voices and forms, and in its incisive critique of the inequalities of gender and race, across social structures and cultural production. It forges a path for creative work that seeks to reckon with exclusionary systems and structures, and is experimental nonfiction at its finest.

Poetry: Caroline Reid, A Poem To My Mother That She Will Never Read

Judge’s comments: Caroline Reid may (or may not) be a shouty person. But let it be said, this poem screams off the screen and demands (in the most beautiful and heart-achingly urgent of ways) to be read. This is a wild, grief-fuelled ride through the landscape of two coexisting worlds (the world of dementia and the ‘other’ world); a poem where the poet straddles what feels like the unbridgeable distance where those closest to us are furthest away; where a daughter mistypes google searches and looks to algorithms for answers where there are none; where the poet, wet with crazy in my good daughter devotion keeps searching and trying to get a handle on something that has no handle. This poem, in all its heartbreaking, jaw dropping glory jumps from one idea to the next like an adult playing leapfrog in a swing park where they don’t want to play anymore. It is original and fresh and devastating in all its terrible beauty.

Digital Innovation: Rae White, Stand Up

Judge's comments: 'Stand Up' is my winner. It was the most integrated and engaging of the pieces. It was immersive and considered. I felt like I was part of a specific story in a way that enhanced my experience as a reader.

Readers’ Choice Award: Cher Tan, By Signalling Nothing I Remain Opaque

2022 Shortlist

The 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award recognises outstanding digital writing by Australian authors with the following shortlisted for this year’s prizes in four categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Digital Innovation.

An additional prize of the Readers’ Choice Award is on offer, which invites all readers to enjoy the shortlist below and cast their vote. The literature piece with the highest number of votes will receive a $250 prize.

The winners of each category, as well as the recipient of the Readers' Choice Award, will be announced in a ceremony at Woollahra Library at Double Bay on 22 November.

Warning: Some of the shortlisted works include adult content and explicit language, as well as disturbing or confronting topics. Readers' discretion is advised.

Fiction Shortlist

“The Golden Bracelet and Smoking Gym are both excellent stories and are Highly Commended. I found the challenge of selecting the winner difficult.The weighing of The Golden Bracelet seems like a metaphor about weighing up an old life. A letting go of a past marriage and the hope for a new life. In Smoking Gym, we cry with the mother who has lost her home but identify with the powerful kindness of the storyteller, her own massive losses hidden under cups of tea.” – Julie Janson

Non-Fiction Shortlist

"The pool of entries for this year's award was of exceptional quality, spanning essays, memoir, criticism and experimental forms: a true showcase of the potential of the genre. I'd like to commend all entrants for their vital, engrossing work.

The best nonfiction connects us to the world around us, harnessing the dynamic power of attention, extending beyond the words on the page to provide for the reader a heightened perception of the work's subject. It encourages us to think differently, with greater complexity and clarity, exciting imagination while being grounded in the tangible. The shortlisted entries, in all their variety of forms and approaches, exhibit this quality to the utmost through their formal experimentation, precision of critical thought, and skill in autobiographical expression." – Vanessa Berry

Poetry Shortlist

“Reading the poems submitted to this year’s Woollahra Digital Literary Award made me feel, to quote Emily Dickinson, as if the top of my head were taken off. From the brilliantly innovative to the melancholically beautiful, each poem contained worlds––of risk, edge, surprise, delight, heart, sorrow and beauty––each using language and form in original, fresh and exciting ways. This made whittling down the entries to this shortlist of six, nigh on impossible. I thank each and every poet who submitted their glorious words. It was beyond joyous to have been presented with such a rich well of poems from which to drink.” – Ali Whitelock

Digital Innovation Shortlist

“This year there were a few themes that were present: the entries were predominantly retro, evoking an old internet, lo-fi feel. The stories, in particular the words, were also rather abstract and unconventionally presented. There was an element of gaming in some and the use of video was extensively used. The stronger submissions balanced the integration of technology with telling a compelling story.” – Brett Osmond

2021 Winners

Here are highlights of the 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award Winners Announcement.

Winners' Announcement

Judges' Comments

Winners

Warning: some of the winning works include adult content and explicit language.

Fiction: Katerina Cosgrove, Zorba the Buddha

Judge's comments: ‘Zorba the Buddha’ by Katerina Cosgrove is an imagined history of the spectacular destruction of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s spiritual movement—known popularly as the “Orange People”—as he and his followers flee controversy and mayhem at their failed ashram in Oregon in the United States and attempt, unsuccessfully, to set up a new utopian community on Crete, while in hiding from the CIA and FBI. Just as Cosgrove explores the interaction between the Rajneeshis and an unyielding state apparatus, she also delves into the intimately-realised and fictionalised relationships of the guru and his acolytes. Never succumbing to simple explanations or judgements, this extraordinary novella animates and illuminates an era of spiritual searching that inspired hope and venality in equal measure.

Non-Fiction: Yen Pham, In the Penal Colony

Judge's comments: The winning entry was compelling and forceful. Pham examined colonial Australia’s incarceration narratives leading to multi-layered and devastating sub-contracting for detention centres both on and offshore, and how the normalisation of these processes and attitudes explain the nation’s carceral response to COVID-19. It was deeply researched and drew together many arguments to present a clear picture of our national failures.

Poetry: Dan Hogan, We're Processing Your Direct Debit

Judge’s comments: From the title, I was hooked. Dan Hogan’s exquisite lines and digital dexterity collide in this dazzling poem that tilts the reader on their axis, sweeps them up into the poem’s own weather system before catapulting them like a controlled scream through the chaos of their world. Through the narrator’s robotic sounding voice, I am pulled by the poem’s centrifugal force into what feels like a video game of my own life unfolding on the screen, while I eat ice cream that never does anything and watch the wheels of my world fall catastrophically off. The brilliantly perfect randomness of some of these lines–– Trumpet like a mop along the linoleum before it’s too late (in 4K) and Gather that for which you’re known (flavoured milk?)––left me in a spin. This poem moves, mesmerises, terrifies, inspires and strangely comforts, because somehow Dan Hogan has seen into my soul and written down what was there. This poem urges us to reject modernity and embrace traditional meta-modernity, before adding, Just kidding. Peel a mandarin, pocket the skin. This poem stuns. And I’m rendered speechless by it.

Digital Innovation: David Henley, The Collapse

Judge's comments: I spent the bulk of my career in book publishing. As part of that job I had to evaluate thousands of stories, often with not much time or even that much content at hand. It isn’t always easy to do but I learned that my innate response to a piece of work was my best guide. I had an instant and very positive response to The Collapse by David Henley. As a reader, I understood what I had to do and the innovative elements included with the story aided my appreciation and enjoyment of the work. The idea that new digital technologies can be employed by writers presents them with a new balancing act. How do they introduce the right digital enhancements, ones that aid the reading experience, that support and expand the experience of imagining or understanding a story? David managed this very well. Sound, imagery, graphics and animation were harnessed to propel the story forward. They were appropriate for the genre of the piece and there was evidence of restraint, which I appreciated. The innovative aspects were relevant and exciting and seamlessly part of the story.

Readers’ Choice Award: Heidi Sfiligoi, I Am Water

2021 Shortlist

The 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award recognises outstanding digital writing by Australian authors with the following shortlisted for this year’s prizes in four categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Digital Innovation.

Warning: some of the shortlisted works include adult content and explicit language.

Fiction Shortlist

Non-Fiction Shortlist

Poetry Shortlist

Digital Innovation Shortlist

2020 Winners

Here are highlights of the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literary Award Winners Announcement.

Watch the full version of the winners announcement video

The following winners of the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literary Award were announced on Thursday 28 May 2020.

Warning: some of the winning works include adult content and explicit language.

Fiction: Peter Polites, The Final Boys

Judge's comments: Haunted and haunting, Peter Polites' The Final Boys is a complex exploration of diaspora, nostalgia, and sexuality. It offers an intimate glimpse into the unnamed narrator's world, where violence, tenderness, silence, and restlessness agitate and elevate each other. This isn't a short story about voyeurism: Polites writes voyeurism itself.

His intelligence is subtle as he guides the ever-shifting gazes throughout the story - the mother's over horror movies; the narrator's over men; older men, security cameras, and authority figures over the 'wog boy'. But Polites reveals his genius when he at last directs the reader's eyes from the evocative prose onto themselves, demonstrating the terror of a hungry gaze that finally stops.

Non-Fiction: Amanda Tink, A History of Reading: Alan Marshall and Helen Keller

Judge's comments: Amanda Tink’s powerful A History of Reading blends personal essay with literary history. Challenging the standard conceptualisation of the work of Helen Keller, Tink reappraises the works of the Australian memoirist and storyteller Alan Marshall, exploring what his work has meant to her own life and writing.

Tink is a personable narrator here, mixing detailed research and history, while creating new pathways to accessing the work of writers with overlooked legacies. She actively reframes and reshapes the thinking of the reader on disability politics and Australian literature in subtle, shifting ways. This is critical thinking, made real on the page, of the very highest order.

Poetry: Omar Sakr, Where I Am Not

Judge’s comments: While this poem does not use the digital medium as part of its poetics, it does that rare thing only exceptional poems can do: cracks a moment open like an egg, and lets the whole world spill out. In 'Where I am Not' Sakr manages to frisk a brief, intimate conversation in an uber trip for everything it’s got: pasts, imaginings of the future, desires and assortments of feeling.

It is an apt poem for the digital age, where the world has been made smaller, displacements greater, and even love and care have been sub-contracted to the gig economy.

Readers’ Choice Award: Mez Breeze, Perpetual Nomads

Judge's comments: Mez Breeze’s Perpetual Nomads explores loneliness, paranoia, and privacy in the digital age. Using virtual reality, Perpetual Nomads innovates how narratives can look.

Featuring engaging character work from sketchy online personas to too-friendly corporations, Mez Breeze opens up possibilities for storytelling through digital mediums.

Shortlist

Fiction

Non-Fiction

"The standard of entries for the non-fiction category in the WDLA this year was incredibly high – so high that determining a shortlist was an unusually difficult task. Non-fiction writers have challenged themselves to think deeply and critically about the world around us, in a time when such thinking is needed more than ever. Here, in the settled shortlist, we find profound new thoughts on topics as wide and varied as disability as a literary category, the recent terrifying bushfire season, the industry around Australian native food, and many more, including reflections on legendary Australian artists such as Vernon Ah Kee and Nick Cave. Australian arts and literary magazines supporting digital first publications deserve to be commended too for the essential role they play in developing and fostering such work." – Sam Twyford-Moore

Poetry

"This year saw an increase in submissions from poets experimenting with what the digital medium has to offer in terms of form, as well as more poems about the digital augmentation of contemporary life. We also saw more poems about fluid identities as well as slippages in time and language. It was very difficult to whittle the submissions down to a shortlist, but the poems I’ve selected showcase something of the range of styles that are made possible by the digital space." – Pip Smith

2019 Winners

The following winners of the 2019 Woollahra Digital Literary Award were announced at Woollahra Library at Double Bay on Thursday 30 May 2019.

Fiction: Rachel Ang, Toot Toot

Judge’s comments: In Rachel Ang's “Toot Toot”, a run-in with an ex turns her protagonist's otherwise banal train trip into an emotional vivisection that transforms the landscape. Her protagonist moves from acting out on her jealousy to realising that these behaviours are as comforting as they are self-destructive to, at last, moving on, all of which is facilitated by Ang's concise writing, deft visual storytelling, and eye for detail. 'Toot Toot' offers storytelling that is vivid and specific, honest and illuminating. In excavating the journeys both on which we embark on a daily basis, Ang unsettles the familiar and skilfully makes familiar her protagonist's psychological landscape.

Non Fiction: Fiona McGregor, The Hot Desk: Working Hot by Mary Fallon

Judge’s comments: Fiona McGregor’s retrospective account of the publication and reception of Kathleen Mary Fallon’s little known 1989 novel Working Hot is a rich work of literary archiving and activism. This is far more than an account of a single (and singular) text – “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do a blow by blow exegesis,” McGregor assures us – as it captures a long history of intersections between Australian publishing and queer culture, while both positioning the book within global literature and documenting McGregor’s early and formative reading practice. Centering and prioritising quotes from Mary Fallon, McGregor writes with both political fire and an urgent comic vernacular. “The Hot Desk: Working Hot by Mary Fallon” is an exemplary and enlightening essay, one which demonstrates that literary criticism can be, and often is, at the forefront of forging new ways of writing non-fiction within digital spaces.

Poetry: Jason Nelson, Nine Billion Branches

Judge’s comments: The spaces “Nine Million Branches” by Jason Nelson encourages us to interact with the everyday: a shopping mall, a bedroom, a lounge room, a computer screen dizzy with words - but he uses the rabbit-warren-like structures of the web to direct our gaze in ways only possible in poetry, and online. Tiny details are circled in crude red pen, drawing us in to contemplate a quilt, an ear, an escalator. Once clicked on, the screen zooms in to a short poem, or shifts our gaze to see this object in a new way. The tone of his poem is cheeky and playful, as is the awkward, even sometimes ugly visual aesthetic. "Nine Billion Branches” by Jason Nelson has a distinctive voice, and is like nothing I have engaged with online before.

Shortlist

Fiction

Non Fiction Shortlist

Poetry Shortlist

2018 Winners

The following winners of the 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award were announced at Woollahra Library at Double Bay on Thursday 31 May 2018.

Non Fiction: Eloise Grills, Diary of a Post-Teenage Girl

Judges comments: ‘Eloise Grills’ series of graphic journal entries for Scum Magazine, published over a twelve-month period, thrive on digital intimacies expressed through a combination of comic art and social media screen shots. Grills is a master of both the visual form and narrative memoir. Her confessions – and they are confessions – are heartfelt and honest. Grills effectively explores demanding contemporary medical practices, alongside the comfort and complexity to be found in relationships. Her diarised contemplations – pushing the personal essay form to its limits – are equally internal and outward looking, engaging with how to live, and develop as an individual, in a busy, chaotic time.’

Fiction: Stephen Wright, A Second Life

Judges comments: ‘Reading Second Life is like watching yourself be dreamed by another. The landscapes of this novella are familiar but disjointed, jumbled, and heavy with surplus associative meaning. The protagonist is, oddly and inexplicably, a real New York punk writer and artist exhumed and given new life in a northern NSW village. In Second Life Wright explores the liminal space between sleeping and waking; fiction writing, memory and dreaming. This novella is like no other I have encountered, though at a stretch it is slightly reminiscent of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, in that at the deep heart of the novella, the protagonist is displaced and renamed; another dreamlike version of herself. Second Life is also reminiscent of Twin Peaks, in that it abides by no logic other than the logic of dreams. Second Life offers a challenging but rewarding reading experience; rich with philosophical insight and magical lyrical turns.’

Short Fiction: Jane Rawson, Lake

Judges comments: ‘In this seamless and masterfully concise horror story, a woman finds herself living at the bottom of a lake. Cleverly playing with the device of the double, Rawson takes a bold premise to satisfying extremes.’

To mitigate a conflict of interest, the Short Fiction winner was unanimously selected by all three judges.

Shortlist

The judges of the 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award selected the following shortlist of 14 entries, out of 99 entries received:

Non Fiction

Fiction

Flash and Short Fiction

2017 Winners

The following winners of the 2017 Woollahra Digital Literary Award were announced at Woollahra Library at Double Bay on Tuesday 27 June 2017.

Non Fiction: Vanessa Berry, Excavating St Peters

Judges comments: 'Timely, political, historical, and lucid.'
'Vanessa Berry is an expert tour guide of a Sydney whose lost history is buried just beneath its shiny, new surfaces. In 'Excavating St Peters', Berry roams a misunderstood suburb, giving lyrical depictions of a kind of beauty that others might see as banal, and, in the meantime, gives a documentary-like take on political protests against over-development. This is nonfiction writing of the highest order.'

Fiction: Melissa Bruce, Picnic at Mount Disappointment

Judges comments: 'A verse novel that charmed in a matter of stanzas. Surprising character development, witty and original observations, honest representation of a prickly teen trying to find her place between worlds. A very enjoyable read.'

Shortlist

Non Fiction

  • Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Bad Writer
  • Vanessa Berry, Excavating St Peters
  • Sam George-Allen, I Put A Spell On You
  • Rory Kennett-Lister, Terrain: An Exploration in Two Parts
  • Suneeta Peres da Costa, A Home in Ananda and the World
  • Matthew Thompson, Night Swimming in Dungog

Fiction

  • Tanya Bird, The Royal Companion
  • Melissa Bruce, Picnic at Mount Disappointment
  • Nick Earls, Gotham
  • Richard Tardif, The Washing Away of Blood
  • Ariella Van Luyn, Bulldozer
  • Danielle de Valera, Dropping Out: A Tree Change Novel-in-Stories
  • Sharon Willdin, Legacy of the Female Factory
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