The Tasmanian Writers' Prize 2024
Entries have now closed. Winners will be announced in late April.
The prize is for short stories up to 3,000 words having an island, or island-resonant, theme.
The winning entry receives a cash prize of $500.
A selection of the best entries will be published in the Forty South Short Story Anthology 2024.
Judges
Claire van Ryn
Claire hails from Launceston and is an awarded writer, journalist and author whose work explores universal themes of connection, compassion, trauma and healing. Her debut novel The Secrets of the Huon Wren (Penguin Random House, 2023) is set beneath the Great Western Tiers and Mother Cummings Peak in Tasmania’s heartland where she was born, and where generations of her mother’s side of the family have lived since they first migrated from England in the 1830s. Claire has just finished her second novel Where The Birds Call Her Name (working title), which will be published early next year, and continues to explore Australia’s diverse landscape, with a particular focus on our island state. Claire holds an Arts degree with an English major and worked as a journalist for The Examiner newspaper for nearly 10 years before motherhood took centrestage. In 2012, Claire’s non-fiction book Faith Like a Mushroom won the Australian Young Christian Writer award. Claire has also put her skills to use as magazine editor, communications specialist, writing tutor and manager of her own content creation business. In her spare time, Claire enjoys op-shopping, painting with watercolours and taking a year to tour Australia in a caravan with her husband and two kids (true story). @clairevanryn
David Owen
David Owen was born in Zimbabwe in 1956. He lived in Malawi, Swaziland and South Africa and obtained a postgraduate degree in Librarianship in Cape Town in 1980.
In 1981 he migrated to London, England, where he worked for the British Council in London as an overseas scholarships officer. He migrated to Australia in 1986 and worked at CSIRO in Melbourne before moving to Tasmania in 1990.
He worked variously as an author and librarian and he edited Tasmania’s Island magazine for five years. He was the director of publishing for Quintus Publishing at the University of Tasmania. He also worked for Arts Tasmania curating the State’s literary festivals and the Tasmania Book Prizes.
David is the Official Secretary, Office of the Governor of Tasmania, a position he held from 2012 until his retirement in March 2024.
David is an author of fiction and nonfiction, 19 titles in all, the four nonfiction books being a natural history series on the thylacine; Tasmanian devils; and sharks (all Allen & Unwin). In 2021 Government House Tasmania: A Remarkable Story was published, a two-volume work co-authored with then Governor Kate Warner.
He is married with two adult sons.
Rayne Allinson
Rayne Allinson has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. She is the author of A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Age of Elizabeth I (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). She is Assistant Publisher at Forty South Publishing and leads the Reading Group at Fullers Bookshop.
