The Pearl Prize Awards Gala

Kristof Mikes-Liu

Kristof (he/him) mostly spends time in and around Sydney, across Gadigal, Darug,

Gundungurra and Wiradjuri lands. He has Singapore-Chinese and Hungarian heritage. He lives with his partner, Brendan, and works as a public sector psychiatrist in a leadership role. He has a particular interest in dialogical practice.

After a very long hiatus, he returned to creative writing during the pandemic. He enjoys the challenge and thrill of making something out of words, and continues to find time to write stories. In 2025, he was fortunate to win the Resilient Blue Mountains Regenesis Prize, the Outstanding Short Story Competition Admin Prize, and to be included in Zine West. He also enjoys learning Spanish and Irish on Duolingo, and preparing an annual linocut print to coincide with the lunar new year.

David Terelinck is a Gold Coast poet notorious for holding words hostage on a page until they agree to become a poem. On the odd occasion, a ransom is paid to him in prize money. David’s poetry has been published extensively in Australia, US, UK, Japan, New Zealand, and Canada. David has co-edited several tanka anthologies and has judged many tanka and free verse poetry competitions.

A lover of gin & tonic and long beach and rainforest walks, David feels we need more poetry andless politics, and firmly believes dolphins should be running the planet.

‘Small Epiphanies,’ published by Calanthe Press in 2024, is his first free verse collection.

Jeanette Barry

A contributor to the 2025 Pearl Prize with her story “Shadows of the digital dream”, Jeanette (She/Her) is a transwoman and career educator who has turned her passion for good storytelling into a means of advocating for our community. Since coming out in her 30s Jeanette has learned to draw heavily on her own experiences like in her story “An

Inconsistent Line” which explores the struggles of trans youth and was longlisted in the 2024 Mansfield readers and writers short story competition. She has a passion for creating rich and engaging characters that are often plagued by realistic flaws like self – doubt, greed and social isolation as they struggle with elements of their own identity.

Raised in a middle-class inner-city family in Melbourne she often struggled with a single sex schooling environment but ultimately managed to achieve her dreams of attending Melbourne University and graduating with a Masters in Secondary Teaching. Since then, Jeanette has taught in a diverse range of schools in Melbourne and Geelong recently working on supporting neurodiverse and high ability learners. Within the workplace Jeanette works tirelessly to gender diverse youth and encourage a culture of inclusion in Victorian schools.

Chloe Macpherson (she/her) was raised on Kaurna Land in South Australia and now lives on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Western Australia. A mechanical engineer by training, she has built a career in the resource sector while nurturing a lifelong love of language and storytelling. Her poetry reflects a quiet fascination with resilience, connection, and the understated beauty of everyday life. Drawn to vast landscapes and moments of stillness, she explores endurance, belonging, and the grace found in simplicity. Guided by contrast -steel and sky, silence and sound - Chloe writes to reconcile logic and feeling, capturing fleeting moments of tenderness and clarity that might otherwise go unnoticed. Her work is shaped by the landscapes around her and by a belief that poetry exists everywhere – in work, in distance, and in the quiet details of daily life.

Hannah Bambra

Hannah Bambra is a writer and peer support worker. She has had writing published in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Monthly and The Saturday Paper. She has a special interest in sexual reproductive health for women and LGBTQIA+ folk.

Lachlan Russ (he/him) is a 30-year-old business owner and newly independently published author living on Awabakal land on the east coast of Australia. Lachlan’s debut novel—Huntingfield Manor is a young adult survival/psychological thriller about trauma, revenge, and the secrets we keep to survive. Lachlan is passionate about storytelling that reflects resilience, identity, and the complexities of human connection.

Caitlin Kotula is a writer, poet, and master’s student living in Perth/Boorloo. She is fascinated by the poetics of place and space and is particularly fond of rabbit holes. Her current creative research explores feminine rage as an apt response to affective injustice, and poems as sites for feminist resistance. Worm Food and Bone Sand is her debut poetry collection.

In 2024, Caitlin received an All Write Hot Desk Fellowship at Centre For Stories, and a Fall Into Focus Residency at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland. Her poem Muscae Volitantes was shortlisted for the Brilliant Poetry Competition and has since been translated into French and Spanish. Most recently, Caitlin hosted OUT of Line, Perth Poetry Festival’s annual queer poetry showcase, and was featured at Curtin University’s inaugural Festival of Writing. She is currently interning for Westerly Magazine and volunteers on the committee for WA Poets Inc. as Social Media Officer. When not penning poems or annotating her books, Caitlin writes existential letters for her Substack newsletter Ruminations.

Liza Dezfouli (she/her) hails from Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa/New Zealand.

She is a writer, poet, performer, and occasional stand-up comedian based in Narrm

(Melbourne). She identifies as feminist, queer, and neurodivergent.

In Australia her short stories have been published in dScribe magazine, Stringybark Travel Anthology, Visible Ink anthologies, full haus anthology, and Wildfire magazine, and she has written stories, memoir pieces and articles for various online publications including Ozy, Narratively, The Hoopla, Mama Mia, and Trouble magazine, and the Hunters Writers’ Centre.In the UK she has been published in The London Reader and the Black Lace Anthology. In 2024 her short story Baby Bird won the Darebin Mayor’s Writing Award. Recently she completed her first novel. As well, she has written plays, monologues, and various works for performance, and has four full-length and numerous short play productions to her name. As an arts journalist, for twelve years she reviewed books, film, music, theatre and all types of live performance from comedy to circus to opera for Arts Hub, Australian Stage Online, and Beat and Inpress magazines. Recently she has been exploring music, learning the ukulele, and writing and performing her own songs. In 2016 she sang Jerusalem on stage, naked, with 50 other women in the show Trilogy.

James May (he/him) lives on a fruit orchard in Bundjalung country, NSW. He listens to far too many politics and true crime podcasts. James studied at RMIT and was a creative writing mentor for people at risk of homelessness in St Kilda for many years.

He is well-published in the LGBTIQA+ media including the Star Observer, Archer magazine, Fuse and Bent Street. His writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Canberra Times. His first play, ‘In The Ghetto’ was produced by Cracked Actors Theatre for the Midsumma festival in 2023, and his second play ‘Hungry Ghosts’ was produced by the Lismore Theatre Company. His short plays have been staged at La Mama Courthouse, Short & Sweet, the Mardi Gras festival and the Drill Hall Theatre in Mullumbimby. He would love to write a screenplay and finish his novel ‘Tenderloin’, a queer thriller set during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. In the meantime, he enjoys the company ofpossums, owls, wallabies and quirky country folks.

Bridget Bracken

Bridget Bracken (she/her) is an archaeologist, a reader and a writer, an arts administrator, and (importantly for this work) a lesbian. She has a lifelong love of books and reading (she started reading at 3 years old), and is thrilled to be included in the Pearl Prize 2026 as her first foray back into the world of writing. She moved from Canada to Australia at 18, and holds a Bachelor of Arts, Honours from the University of Melbourne, where she studied ancient history and anthropology. Several of her essays have been published in Chariot, the University's student-run history journal. She won the Classical Association of Victoria Award for Best Classical or Ancient History Presentation at the National Archaeology Student Conference in 2023. She has

spent several summers working on an archaeological site in Italy. In reading and in writing, Bridget is particularly fascinated by stories that explore the complexity of human relationships, in all their forms, and how the past impacts the present. She looks forward to exploring these themes in her own way in future writing projects. She currently works in operations at an art gallery, and lives in Melbourne. You can find her online @_bridgetjane on Instagram.

Jessie Field (She/Her) is a bi author from Gadigal/Sydney who loves to explore memories, myth and identity in her writing. After completing her Masters of Ancient History, Jessie's fascination with how narratives and individuals craft and shape our ideas of society continues to inspire her writing. Writing has allowed Jessie to

explore her own queer and neurodivergent identity by imagining new spaces that can offer acceptance. At present, Jessie works casually at her local, independent bookshop as she recovers from the gruelling world of Higher Degree Research. While her free days are dedicated to writing the things she loves. Whether that be returning to her fantasy novel or delving into short stories taken from moments in her life, Jessie wants

writing to emerge from every aspect of her world. If she isn't writing, Jessie is singing in her queer choir 'Loud and Proud', painting, crocheting or just curling up with a new book in search of her next inspiration.

Matt Mitchell (he/him) is a writer based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in the Central Highlands of Victoria, where he lives with his husband, Anderson, his son, Reuben, and a terrier named Diego. His work drifts between poetry, memoir, and hybrid storytelling, tracing the edges of identity, memory, and belonging. Matt’s journalistic work has appeared in news media across Australia. A ferocious loather of the corporate appropriation of the word pivot, he prefers to think of himself instead as now pirouetting

toward creative writing and literary journalism.

He completed undergraduate studies in journalism and politics at the University of Queensland, postgraduate studies in media and communications at Swinburne University, and will complete a Master of Creative Writing at Macquarie University in 2026.

Matt’s current project, Farewell, Telemachus, is a fragmented, non-linear hybrid work that fuses literary journalism with memoir to revisit the scars of familial trauma.

Neil Ray is a retired child protection investigator. He began writing and taking courses as a way to relax and refresh after work. Since then, he only writes for pleasure, submitting the occasional better piece to competition but is content to simply enjoy the writing process. Being a Finalist in The Pearl Prize has been his greatest success.

While Neil has had articles published in magazines, the biggest writing project for him was to write a synopsis and script for Murray Raine, a professional puppeteer, who performed the show, “They Came From Uranus”, at Midsummer and fringe festivals across Australia. The production was directed by James Welsby of Yummy Productions. It performed to full houses with positive reviews.

Like many in the queer community, Neil identifies with marginalised souls as they struggle to be heard, read and seen. He is currently writing a coming-of-age children’s story where the protagonist breaks out of his chrysalis to a waiting world.

Averil Bones is an Australian copywriter, speechwriter and environmental advocate. Between 2013 and 2016, she judged the national finals of Keep Australia Beautiful's Cleanest Beach Competition. Her creative work has appeared in the San Francisco Salvo, Ygdrasil, The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks, Going Down Swinging, Carillion, Concrete Wolf, Makata, and in the 2023 Newcastle Short Story Prize

Anthology. Australian composer Nathan Wilson included Averil's poem Ganymede and Callisto with his piece HeartBroken Glass in the Sea of Tranquility published by The Australian Music Centre. Averil is a keen sailor, and divides her time between the sea and her garden in the country.