This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the winner of the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, ‘C.Q.D.’ by Laura Elvery. The young narrator of ‘C.Q.D.’ is on board the Carpathia in the year 1912. The ship is racing towards the Titanic after hearing its distress signal. Will it reach the Titanic in time? This year’s Jolley judges called ‘C.Q.D.’ an ‘iceberg of a story: it carries its heft below the surface’. An irreverent mix of melodrama, time travel, and pop culture, Elvery’s story also asks ‘unexpectedly profound questions about what it means to witness, remember, and share a catastrophe’.

This year’s Jolley, the sixteenth in the history of the prize, was judged by Delia Falconer, Jonathan Ricketson, and Beejay Silcox. The judges chose ‘C.Q.D.’ from a field of 1,174 entries across thirty-two countries. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 and is for an original work of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words, written in English. 

Laura Elvery is the author of two short story collections, Ordinary Matter (2020), and Trick of the Light (2018), as well as a novel, Nightingale (2025), which received the 2025 People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award.

Here is Laura Elvery with ‘C.Q.D.’, published in the August issue of ABR.