Final report & winners of the 2025 York Regional Writers Weekend Short Story Competition
This year’s entries – around double last year’s! – form a panorama of narrative ambition and style. Among them, the finest pieces distinguish themselves not merely by their command of language but by the integrity of their emotional vision and solid characterisation. These are stories that have both structural clarity and thematic gravity. They don’t simply describe but illuminate.
In the mid-tier are works that, though occasionally uneven, reveal a distinct voice or compelling mood – some excel in evoking the texture of lived experience, others in their lightness of touch or flashes of humour. Their imperfections, often in the realm of structure or depth, don’t preclude their merit.
At the lower end are stories driven more by concept than craft. These frequently prioritise accessibility or didacticism – particularly when directed toward a younger readership – over the layered complexity and tonal control that characterise more mature work. Yet even here, the impulse to communicate something meaningful is obvious.
Taken as a whole, the entries reveal considerable talent. In the best of these stories, one senses not only a grasp of literary form but courage: the will to observe the human condition with insight, restraint, and care.
Will Yeoman, CEO Writing WA
Over 17 Years
1st Prize ($500 CASH): The Ones Who Stay Still – Calliope Vale
This story buzzes with a contemporary vitality, its narrator’s voice buoyant with wit, observational acuity, and a kind of breezy melancholia. Through sharp dialogue and a deft rendering of place, the tale probes the tensions between movement and stasis – the tug between leaving and remaining, between restlessness and the rootedness of home. The motorcycles, ever circling through the town’s narrow streets, become emblematic of life’s unceasing revolutions.
The central encounter – casual, even slight in narrative terms – nonetheless becomes a pivot, a mirror through which the protagonist glimpses the self anew. Supporting characters are drawn with affectionate irony; they round out the piece without encumbering it. What sets this story apart is its tonal balance: the ease with which it marries levity to pathos, velocity to stillness.
2nd Prize ($200 Barclay Books): Red – Kezia Pettitt
What immediately stood out in this piece was its lyrical and immersive style. The writing is emotionally raw, employing poetic repetition, a fragmented chronology, and vivid sensory detail to convey the experience of trauma and the ongoing process of recovery.
Thematically, the story delves deeply into trauma, memory, and resilience. It explores the lingering effects of violence and the protagonist’s struggle to reclaim the present – a journey rendered with both nuance and empathy. The plot unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, blending memory and present through a stream-of-consciousness approach. The birth scene is harrowing and intense, yet the story’s conclusion offers a fragile but genuine sense of hope.
17 Years & Under
1st Prize ($250 CASH): The White Lily – Ryan Toor
Lyrical and unhurried, this story draws the reader into a world suspended between light and shadow, recollection and disorientation. Its language is suffused with a painterly attention to colour and sensation – phrases such as “amber-red crepuscular rays” evoke a twilight both literal and emotional.
At its heart is a portrayal of dementia that eschews dramatics for something gentler and closer to truth. The love between the protagonist and her husband is conveyed not through overt declarations but through gesture, silence, and the enduring rituals of care. The narrative is further enriched by a brief author’s note, which offers a glimpse into the writer’s intent without circumscribing the story’s interpretive possibilities. The result is deeply affecting: a piece that shimmers with fragility, yet never lapses into fragility’s cousin, sentimentality.
2nd Prize ($50 Barclay Books): Gold – Isabella Corrales
A mythopoetic fable of rare ambition, this tale stretches across cosmic time, yet remains rooted in human emotion: envy, redemption, the thirst to create. Its philosophical bent is evident in meditations such as the paradoxical notion that “the insignificance of existence made it glorious.”
The story’s architecture is grand yet never cold. The central relationship – between Lux, whose journey is both moral and metaphysical, and Cressida, emblem of creativity and light – is handled with warmth and imaginative finesse. The world they inhabit, with its “vast oceans with rocky areas” and encroaching Darkness, is rendered in cinematic detail. Yet it is not the spectacle but the intimate ethical tensions that remain longest in the mind.
