2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award

Flicker of Justice, No More 

Sydney, 1980: The Turkish consul-general is assassinated by two gunmen, and an international terrorist group claim responsibility. Vrezh, an Armenian-Australian, longs to be involved, believing the attacks are justice for the Armenian genocide.

Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s work appears in Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, the Australian, and Kill Your Darlings. Her memoir, Full of Donkey: Travels in Armenia, was shortlisted for the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. She’s appeared at Noted and Story Club, and is a Moth StorySLAM winner.

Everybody Loves a Good Cook Book

Everybody Loves a Good Cook Book is a collection of fiction that plays with realities and histories, whether it is picking up a hitch-hiking Captain Cook in modern day Hawaii who is determined to understand what happened to him there and make his story end better, or a dying mountaineer on Mount Everest taking life advice from the dead mountaineers around him. The tone is irreverent and the humour dark, tinged with absurdity, like Ned Kelly taking writing advice from James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway as they edit his Jerilderie letter in a café he has bailed up in Paris.

Craig Cormick is an award winning science communicator and author. He was published 30 works of fiction and non-fiction, and has been a writer in residence in Malaysia and Antarctica. He enjoys messing with history just about as much as history enjoys messing with him.

Maps for the Lost

The characters of ‘Maps for the Lost’ are immersed in, altered by, and transformed into nature.  A Czech artist re-maps the world by night in order to find his lover, a diver sinks his yacht under the weight of coral and fish. The collection is a kind of ecological fairytale, a coracle of stories haunted by loss in a biosphere which is unravelling, whose characters (human and animal) are almost unfailingly lost. The islands, forests, coastlines and gardens they inhabit are the maps. This ‘buzzing, howling, gurgling biosphere,’ to borrow the words of Max Oelschlaeger, is the map.

Susie Greenhill lives on the mouth of a river in Tasmania’s far south. Her short fiction has been published in anthologies and journals.  Her soon to be finished novel manuscript, ‘The Clinking’, won the 2016 Richell Prize. She has a PhD in creative writing and environmental literature.

Goodbye Tom Morrow

'Goodbye Tom Morrow' is a collection of short stories, flash fiction and creative non-fiction. Mel's style could be described as experimental or rhizomatic, with a strong leaning towards rhythm and musicality rather than plot. The work explores growing up, feeling different, awkwardness, social isolation, Wheatbelt life and transitioning to the city, feeling like an interloper within a step-family, romantic love, bodily dysfunction, chronic-pain, anxiety and mental health issues, and the value of writing as a way of bringing things together and making sense of it all.

Mel Hall is a writer and musician based in Fremantle, Western Australia. Her novella The Choir of Gravediggers was published by Ginninderra Press in 2016. Her short stories have been published by Sleepers, Tincture and Swamp Writing. She is currently working on her first novel.

Small Forest

Small Forest is a collection of nine short stories. The stories are linked by recurring concerns, such as the return of the repressed. The effects of music and the nature of relationships between generations are other concerns. In ‘Vivien’s Fingers’ a new parent tries to learn the piano, in an attempt to maintain an inner life separate from her young child. ‘Children’s Hospital’ depicts a ward of children suffering anorexia, while ‘Uncle Dan’s War’ explores the effects of post-traumatic stress on a returned POW. The protagonists are varied in these stories – and variously haunted.

William Lane lives in the Hunter Valley, NSW. Transit Lounge has published three of his novels, Over the Water (2014), The Horses (2015) and The Salamanders (2016), and is due to publish his fourth novel, The Word, in September 2018. He has also published several short stories.

Remnants of Sound

The short stories in Remnants of Sound slide between the real and the unreal, between the straightforward and the experimental.  They chart the path of loners, drifters, the homeless and the heartbroken. They are stories of people at the edge of themselves and the edge of society where the smallest shift can have major consequences.

Catherine Moffat is a short story writer living on the NSW Central Coast. Awards include the inaugural Hope Prize, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction prize and The Body in the Library competition.  Shortlistings or commendations include the Margaret River Short Story competition, the Scarlett Stiletto, the Newcastle Short Story prize and the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story competition.

Two Sets of Books

Set in Hobart public library, Two sets of books contains five stories, each exposing the astonishing secret lives of the staff who work there. A book shelver burns down the library in a hate-crime inspired by love. A technical support officer recreates his dead wife in an illegal sex videogame. A home-library courier intimidates an elderly widow into growing marijuana. A librarian befriends a paedophile, who asks if he will help euthanise him. A security guard deciphers messages in books to prevent an armed robbery. … Sex, drugs, arson, armed robbery—this is not the library as you know it.

Ruairi Murphy is a librarian and writer based in Hobart. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Tasmanian Premier’s literary prize and was a finalist in the Tasmanian writer’s prize. In his writing, Ruairi likes to explore themes around identity, memory, and the boundaries between human and animal.