Island Nonfiction Prize 2026 shortlist announcement
This year’s entries for the Island Nonfiction Prize did not disappoint! We received submissions from many talented writers from around Australia and are delighted to announce the five shortlisted essays in alphabetical order by surname (scroll below to learn more about each of the authors).
Maya Alborz, ‘Pest control: A one-shot RPG’
Kailum Graves, ‘Instructions for escaping a planet you still live on’
Neen Ramos, ‘Statutory declaration of lost property’
Rebecca Ryall, ‘Abject Pig’
Beau Windon, ‘Hugh Manatee VS Jenn Ayy-Aye: Un/correct criticisms of an atypical antagonist’
The submissions were judged ‘blind’ by Nonfiction Editor Keely Jobe and two wonderful guest judges, Hayley Singer and Sam Elkin. One winner will be announced in early August and all five will be featured in issue 179, which will hit stands in September.
About this year’s submissions, Keely shares, ‘Writers are up against it at the moment - poor funding, declining readership, a homogenised publishing industry, and, with the introduction of AI, concerns around copyright and authorship. Apparently that's not stopping writers from writing because for this year's Island Nonfiction Prize, we had over 170 submissions with a huge amount of literary talent included therein; understandably, deciding on a shortlist was a mighty task for this year's judges. The pieces we've selected are thematically prescient, formally inventive and critically challenging. The voices in each piece are strong and singular, and it seems that each story is felt as much as it's told. As a group, this shortlist demonstrates a multiplicity of experience and subjectivity, proving that the Australian monoculture of current debate is, as Keating once suggested, a complete myth. I can't wait for our readers to dig in’.
Please continue to visit our website for future competitions and other opportunities and events.
Meet the authors
Maya Alborz
Maya is currently earning her BA in English and Creative Writing at UNSW. She is interested in writing that represents life on the page, with a focus on marginalised perspectives.
Kailum Graves
Kailum is a writer and poet from Meanjin. His work often blends the speculative, the comic and the deeply human, exploring grief, memory, bureaucracy, tenderness and the strange machinery of being alive. He is currently working across fiction, poetry, essays and television.
Neen Ramos
Neen (she/her) is a poet and nonfiction writer based on Dharug Country. Her work explores the complexities of immigrant experience, cultural identity and belonging. She was a recipient of the 2025 WestWords–Varuna Emerging Writers Residency and was named one of Red Room Poetry’s ‘30 in 30’ prompt winners during Poetry Month 2025. Neen is currently developing gods of the margins, her debut collection, which examines the liminal spaces between cultural identity, colonial inheritance and the act of becoming in a new land.
Rebecca Ryall
Rebecca (she/her), shares space, studies and writes with the place beings of the Widjabul:Wai-bal lands where she has lived since 1999.
Beau Windon
Beau is a neurodivergent author of Wiradyuri heritage based in Naarm. His personal essays have been a winner of Griffith Review’s 2023 Emerging Voices competition and a finalist for the Writers Prize in the 2024 Melbourne Prize for Literature. In 2025, Beau’s poetry project was a finalist for the David Unaipon Award and he won the Daisy Utemorrah Award for his children’s manuscript. Beau is doing his PhD in the Aesthetic Form of Neurodivergent Literary Memoir. If Beau could be any animal, he would be a chocolate egg – the kind with a toy hidden inside.