2025 Fresh Ink Shortlist

Three Hunter region residents are among five writers shortlisted for the 2025 Fresh Ink Prize. This is the fifth year Newcastle Writers Festival has offered the prize, which is open to emerging regional NSW writers aged over 18.

This year’s judges were writers Courtney Collins and Natasha Rai.

The winner will be announced at a special event on 25 October at Watt Space Gallery, which is free and open to all. Please click on the link below to register to assist with catering. The winner receives $5000 for professional development thanks to the generosity of Newcastle wine label Elephant in the Room, a week-long residency at Varuna, The Writer’s House and will have their entry published in the summer issue of Swell Magazine. The prize is also supported by Create NSW.

For the first time, each shortlisted writer will receive $250 thanks to festival Patrons.

The judges offered this comment:

“These entries stood out for:

• Risk-taking– Bold creative choices that push boundaries;
• Clear vision– Evidence of deliberate craft and purposeful storytelling;
• Precise world-building– Rich, specific details that brought settings to life;
• Trust in the reader– Avoidance of over-explanation, allowing discovery;
• Strong openings– Confident beginnings that dropped readers into the story.”

The shortlisted writers are:

Jessie Ansons, Forever Yours

Jessie Ansons is a Hunter region writer. Her short stories have been published in the Newcastle Herald, Canberra Times, Catchfire Press anthology, and the Hunter Writers Centre Grieve Project. Her work also features in Stringybark anthologies, and her scripts have been shortlisted in four Short+Sweet Festivals.

Set in small-town NSW, the novel Forever Yours centres on Evelyn, who hopes to find peace when her abusive husband dies from terminal cancer. But Alastair lives on through the Artificial Intelligence (AI) program he developed to continue to track her every move. The AI mimics Alastair’s voice and mannerisms, and Evelyn, caught between grief and trauma, begins to respond. When she pleads with the AI to stop the abuse, it adapts into a gentler, more empathetic version of Alastair.

Shannon Benton, Fragmented

Shannon is an emerging Hunter region writer whose work delves into memory, dementia, and the complexities of mother–daughter relationships. Drawing on her background in disability and aged care, she crafts biographies for elders whose stories might otherwise go unheard, driven by a passion for preserving and celebrating diverse human experiences.

Fragmented is a novel written in fragmentary, unreliable first-person perspective. Elise, a writer with early-onset dementia, becomes increasingly erratic as her grasp on identity and memory fractures. She believes she might be the reincarnation of Joan Lindsay, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock, compelled to write ‘The Great Australian Novel’ before she loses herself completely.

Carlie Slattery, Glitterbomb

Carlie is a writer and freelance editor living in Northern NSW. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Communication Studies) and previously worked as a subeditor, features editor, and journalist at multiple newspapers. She is currently working on her first novel.

Glitterbomb is a novel set between the present day and the 1990s, in a fictional town on the NSW North Coast called Aura Point. It is inspired by girls’ experiences growing up in the ’90s, and how many of us are still untangling the lessons we learned about love, sex, friendship, internalised misogyny, societal expectations, and body image—especially when it comes to raising the next generation.

Monique Wallace, The Unrising Sun

Monique lives on Awabakal land and is an avid writer both in her professional and personal life. Her work is featured in Kill Your Darlings, and Teacher, Teacher published by Affirm Press. She completed the 2024 Faber Writing Academy Writing a Novel online course with Carrie Tiffany and was shortlisted for the 2024 Newcastle Writers Festival Fresh Ink Prize. Monique is the chronically online marketing gal for the National Young Writers’ Festival.

The Unrising Sun is a dystopian middle grade novel that explores what it means to live in a world where the climate has been turned on its head, and what happens when the information you receive only tells part of the story.

Sylvia Wilczynski, The Bullet

Sylvia’s projects as a screen producer include 90-minute feature documentary Bomb Harvest released on ABC and in cinemas around Australia to 4-star reviews, and drama feature film The Rocket, which won over 50 awards, including Best Debut Feature and the Crystal Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and Best Film and the Audience Award at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. In 2024 she completed the Faber Academy Writing a Novel course and was shortlisted for the Fresh Ink Prize.

The Bullet is a novel set between contemporary northern NSW and Nazi-occupied Poland, weavings literary and historical fiction with a supernatural edge. It explores the legacy of violence and is inspired by Sylvia’s family history.