Jolley time for winners

GOOD friends Gregory Day and Carrie Tiffany were surprised and delighted to be named joint winners of a major short story competition.

NOVELISTS Gregory Day and Carrie Tiffany are joint winners of the Australian Book Review's Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

In addition to sharing the $5000 prize, they each received $1000 for being shortlisted alongside Claire Aman and Gaylene Carbis.

``It's a great honour, especially with Elizabeth Jolley's name attached to it,'' says Day, who lives on the south west coast of Victoria.

``Literary novelists do live on the smell of an oily rag, so any little bit you get means you almost get permission to continue.''

Remarkably, Day and Tiffany are friends and sought each other's advice on the stories they submitted.

``When I read his story I thought that's a great story. I made a couple of small suggestions - not that it needed anything because it was terrific - and vice versa, the same thing happened when he read mine,'' Tiffany says.

Day says he wrote the short story specifically for the competition.

``I hardly ever write short fiction, but this past year I've been putting Sundays aside and reading contemporary Irish short fiction and then when I saw the prize announced, I thought, `OK, I'll give it go','' he says.

``Maybe now I'll have another go at the shorter form because I love the short form.

``For a prose writer it's the equivalent of a poem.''

His short story, The Neighbour's Beans, is set in Victoria, near the coastal settings of his novels The Patron Saint of Eels (2005); Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds (2007) and The Grand Hotel (2010).

Tiffany says her story, Before He Left the Family, is set in Perth in the 1970s and quite autobiographical.

``I am interested in people's isolation within the landscape," she says.

``That was a theme for Elizabeth Jolley and where I grew up in Perth, near Mundaring, was very close to where Elizabeth Jolley had a farm, and the idea that a woman might have a farm or be involved in the landscape in some way has always been inspiring to me. In fact, I'm a farming journalist now."

Tiffany's second novel, Mateship with Birds, will be published in February.

The winners were announced at Readings Carlton on October 12.

Australian Book Review assistant editor Mark Gomes said themes of migration and domestic breakdown were prominent among the 1300 entries.

There was also ``a weird frequency of green supermarket bags''.

``What we settled on, I'll think you'll agree, are masterly exercises in contained storytelling - modest, economic and unpretentious each in their own way," he said at the launch of ABR's Fiction  issue.

``As judges we were looking for stories with memorably voiced characters and this is what we have in these four stories.''

You can read the winning and shortlisted stories in ABR's Fiction issue this month, in print or online at www.australianbookreview.com.au