Beginning this week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story – also published in the August issue of ABR. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an event at Gleebooks in Sydney on August 15. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode One features Kerry Greer’s ‘First Snow’.

The judges had this to say about ‘First Snow’:

‘First Snow’ subtly enacts a vulnerable young woman’s decision to leave her self-absorbed, manipulative partner, the father of her baby. Contrasting her banal relationship with a poetic response to the natural world and the enchantments of motherhood, the story reminds us that traditional domestic fiction, in the hands of an intelligent, empathic writer, can render the ‘ordinary’ both psychologically complex and deeply affecting.

Kerry Greer is an Irish-Australian poet and writer. She received the Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021. Kerry has been shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and more. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Cedar Crest College. Her début poetry collection, The Sea Chest, was published by Recent Work Press in 2023. Here is Kerry Greer with ‘First Snow’, published in the August issue of ABR.