Cirrus@Austlit

'The eighth edition of Award Winning Australian Writing (AWAW) continues its commitment to showcasing the best short stories and poems that have won competitions around the country. This year, AWAW is proudly launching at the Melbourne Writers Festival, on 30 August at 5pm.

'The collection will feature over fifty writers and competitions. It will include a foreword by Elizabeth Flux, freelance writer and editor of Voiceworks magazine. Both established and emerging writers are featured in this year's anthology, including Kevin Gillam, Emmie Rae, Jessica Yu, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Chloe Wilson, who won The Age Short Story Competition in 2012, and David Campbell, who has published two books of original Australian verse and a collection of short stories, and has been published extensively in Australian short story and poetry anthologies. '

'These are stories rendered in miniature and moments inscribed with precise focus. Australia's best microwordsmiths offer journeys in words that will take you somewhere surprising. A stolen glimpse of a father dancing alone to music; Gothic landscapes on the New South Wales coast; incredible spectrums in the colours of butterflies; Aussie cricket and climate change; remembrances of an exiled home land or the awkward sexual politics at a funeral. These stories capture delightful and unsettling moments of estrangement, when the new becomes familiar and the ordinary, sublime. ' (Publication summary)