2025 Grieve Project longlist announced
The Hunter Writers’ Centre has announced the longlist for the 2025 Grieve Project, an annual competition for writing on grief and loss.
Among longlisted entrants are:
Poetry
- Anne Benjamin for ‘Olive Tree at Beit Hanoun’
- Sophia Bilbrough for ‘The Possibility of Home’
- Emma Brazil for ‘nothing’
- Oliver Brown for ‘My Friends After Grief’
- Coral Carter for ‘Ordinary Things I Want to Tell Her’
- Janet Chan for ‘Triolets for S’
- Joo-Inn Chew for ‘Key’
- Michael Cunliffe for ‘Life Between Breaths’
- S R Ekstein for ‘Trustfall’
- Anne Elvey for ‘From a Suite for Elaine’
- Jane Frank for ‘What I Do Remember’
- Marcelle Freiman for ‘After one year of mourning’
- Maree Gardner Chapman for ‘It Was a Small Room’
- Deborah Godley for ‘Even Superheroes Die’
- Rachael Guy for ‘Eating my own kittens’
- Maggie Wairimu Hari for ‘Two weeks to grieve my beloved’
- Dimitra Harvey for ‘Spear Thistle’
- Joey Hespe for ‘Grief is a Man in the Tree.’
- Paul Hetherington for ‘The Language of Water’
- Linda Judge for ‘helsinki’
- Linda Judge for ‘the odyssey’
- Pippa Kay for ‘Seagulls’
- Gemma Killen for ‘November 2023’
- Rowena Lennox for ‘Magenta’
- Deb Lucas for ‘Act One’
- Sarah Maddison for ‘The end of the season’
- Ros Marsden for ‘Silent Number’
- Nathan McDonald for ‘what wasn’t’
- Iskandar Nugraha for ‘Memori dalam Keheningan’
- Moya Pacey for ‘After Thanksgiving’
- Clare Parore for ‘Dad’
- Sarah Pearce for ‘i(nter)rupted’
- Tikvah Quirk for ‘Daniel – Your light and love shine beyond the moon and stars and over our Country’
- Sarah Rice for ‘Where is the windhover now?’
- Robyn Rowland for ‘Casting Memory’
- Richenda Rudman for ‘Portrait’
- Ellen Shelley for ‘The Grief Triptych’
- Kristy Sibanda for ‘O’ Child’
- Janelle Standish for ‘The Grief No One Sees’
- Samantha Stratton for ‘Brian’
- Samantha Stratton for ‘The loss’
- Leah Szántó for ‘Mo(u)rning’
- Ric Taylor for ‘Nocturne – Three years after’
- Sandra Thom-Jones for ‘Age: 50. Diagnosis: Autism.’
- Oormila V Prahlad for ‘Powder Blue Sky’
- Amelia Walker for ‘Language’
- Sean West for ‘She Called Me Tiger’
Poetry & artwork
- Dane McCormack for ‘I had to lose my mind to find my soul’
Prose
- Linda Atkins for ‘You: Her’
- Cindy Bennett for ‘The Song Ends’
- Anna Chandler for ‘Day of Liberation’
- Joo-Inn Chew for ‘Green Team’
- Susan Collings for ‘The Drowning Girl’
- Liza Dezfouli for ‘Perhaps Never’
- Edilia Ford for ‘The Touchstone’
- Kylie Gardiner for ‘Closeted’
- Alexandra Geneve for ‘Tomorrow, Do Thy Worst’
- Natalie Grealish for ‘It happens’
- Tiffany Hastie for ‘Mourning Behaviour in Dolphins’
- Till Heike for ‘Tomb/Womb’
- Alysha Herrmann for ‘The Silence’
- Lina Jabbour for ‘Cottage’
- Vivien Long for ‘The path of least reopening’
- Karen Lynch for ‘Mothering’
- Dorian Mode for ‘Flathead Variations’
- Bron Morrison for ‘The Spirit House’
- Lucy Norton for ‘Birthday’
- Margaret Parker for ‘In Her Heart’
- Tracy Peacock for ‘The comfort of cheese’
- Jo Rendle for ‘Grief in 19 parts’
- Pauline Sorensen for ‘Forbidden Grief’
- Eli Sutherland for ‘Fields of red and cities of blue’
- Henriette Tkalec for ‘Aphasia / The Loss of Language’
- Becca Wang for ‘In Mao’s Country’.
All longlisted works will be featured in an online multimedia gallery and published in the 2025 Grieve Anthology, which is slated for launch on Wednesday 29 October at the storytelling event Lament, where the 2025 prize winners will also be announced.
Among the prizes are several in-memoriam awards, as well as several sponsored awards, with cash prizes ranging from $100 to $1500.
Curators of the 2025 project are poet, performer and therapist-in-training Lamisse Hamouda and poet, producer and former psychologist David Stavanger. Associate curator Paris Rosemont also supported the selection process.
More information on the project – including longlisted works in the other categories of image, artwork and video – is available on the Hunter Writers’ Centre website.
Category: Awards Local news
