The shortlists have been announced for the 2026 Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writer Awards, recognising Australian writing on Jewish subjects published in 2025.
The winners will be revealed on Monday 3 August at the opening event of the Festival of the Spoken Word, presented by Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.
Now in their third year, the awards recognise excellence in contemporary Australian writing on Jewish subjects and promote the reading of these texts while supporting current and
The 2026 awards cover non-fiction, fiction, playwriting, young writers and poetry, with prize money ranging from $500 to $10,000.
The Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-Fiction, now in its third year, carries a $10,000 prize for works of significant relevance to the Jewish experience.
The shortlist features Katia Ariel’s Ferryman: The life and deathwork of Ephraim Finch, John M. Efron’s All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat, Ittay Flescher’s The holy and the broken: A cry for Israeli-Palestinian peace from a land that must be shared, and Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7, edited by Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch.
Previous winners of the non-fiction award were Jana Vytrhlik for Treasures of Old Jewish Sydney in 2025 and Michael Gawenda for My Life as a Jew in 2024.
The Bobby Adler Award for Young Jewish Writers offers $5,000 for works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry on Jewish subjects by authors aged 18 to 40.
The shortlisted writers are Merav Fima for Late Blossoms, Anna Jacobson for All Rage Blaze Light, and Shaina Rother for They Found Paradise: Retracing the Jewish History of Australia’s Gold Coast.
The award was previously presented as The Jewish
Independent Award for Young Jewish Writers. Past winners were Ellie Bouhadana for Ellie’s Table: Food from Memory and Food from Home in 2025 and Anna Jacobson for Anxious in a Sweet Store in 2024.
The Edith Hausmann Award for Jewish Playwrights, now in its second year, awards $10,000 for full-length unproduced plays of any genre that engage with Jewish subjects and are written by Jewish Australian writers aged 18 to 45.
Ziggy Enoch’s Sabotage and Nomi Kaltmann’s Bad Rabbis have been shortlisted. Elise Hearst won the award in 2025 for Batsheva.
The Szymon (Simon) Klitenik Award for Jewish Fiction carries a $5,000 prize for a fiction book, either a novel or a collection of short stories.
The category is not shortlisted, with the winner to be announced at the awards ceremony. Last year’s winner was Linda Margolin Royal for The Star on the Grave.
The Chaya Fedler Award for Poetry is being presented for the first time this year. It awards $500 for a poem that captures an aspect of the Jewish experience and has a Jewish “neshama”, or soul.
The poetry shortlist includes Jessica Chapnik Kahn’s I Never Knew a Song Could Be a Knife, Marcelle Freiman’s The Copper Pots, Leah Kaminsky’s Sleep School, Michael Leibowitz’s Travelling to Jerusalem, Sarah Sassoon’s Ashlonak, and Gadia Zrihan’s Koldre.
Sydney Aaranson, program manager of the Australian Jewish Writer Awards, said this year’s shortlist showed the range of Jewish writing being produced in Australia.
“This year’s shortlist reflects the range of contemporary Jewish writing coming out of Australia right now, including memoir, history, fiction, and poetry, and the growing audience for these stories,” Aaranson said.
“We’ve expanded the awards this year to recognise more forms of writing. Thanks to the generosity of our donors who have made it possible to offer greater support and visibility to Australian Jewish writers, from established names to those just starting out.”
The Awards Ceremony and Panel Conversation will include international authors Ayelet Tsabari and Yishay Ron Ishi in conversation with Michaela Kalowski.
Shalom Collective is a Sydney-based nonprofit that creates contemporary Jewish cultural experiences, including Sydney Jewish Writers Festival, the Jewish Food Festival, Adamama and PJ Library.
Melbourne Jewish Book Week is partnering with the event to bring the international authors to the awards night.
The public is invited to attend; to book click here