Each year we make the eligible nominations received for the annual Convenors’ Award for Excellence public. There are several reasons for this:

• There is no shortlist announced, so it feels right to recognise the nominations;
• These are items you may not otherwise have come across, so we’d like to make sure you know about them;
• It may help people figure out what might be eligible in future.

It is very important to note that this list is NOT a shortlist – it is simply a list of the eligible entries we received for the Award this year (please note also that these can be self-nominated). The convenors consider all eligible entries in deciding the winner, but there is no shortlist generated, and only the winner will be presented at the ceremony, which takes place in Brisbane on Saturday 21 February, 2026.

A reminder what this award is for:

The Convenors’ Award for Excellence is awarded at the discretion of the convenors for a particular achievement in speculative fiction or related areas in that year that cannot otherwise by judged for the Aurealis Awards. 

This award can be given to a work of non-fiction, artwork, film, television, electronic or multimedia work, or one that brings credit or attention to the speculative fiction genres.

This year’s nominations are:

Helen Marshall, Kim Wilkins & Lisa Bennett, Story Thinking and the Real-world Applications of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writing (Bloomsbury)

Story Thinking and the Real-world Applications of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writing demonstrates something genuinely important: that the skills we develop as speculative fiction writers aren’t just for telling great stories—they’re essential tools for solving real-world problems.

What makes this book different from typical writing scholarship is that co-authors Helen Marshall, Kim Wilkins and Lisa Bennett don’t just theorize about these connections, they document actual case studies where Story Thinking methodologies have been successfully applied to complex challenges. Their work with the Defence Science Technology Group shows how the imaginative and world-building capacities inherent to SF and fantasy writing can inform strategic foresight and defense innovation. This represents validation from one of Australia’s most rigorous institutions that genre fiction skills are strategic assets. The UNHCR case study is equally compelling, demonstrating how speculative fiction’s emphasis on imagining alternative futures can address humanitarian challenges around digital identity for refugees. The authors identify four key practices from SF and fantasy storytelling—envisioning, engaging, inhabiting, and empathizing—and show how these translate into practical methodologies for collaborative problem-solving across defense, government policy, healthcare, and humanitarian contexts. This work fundamentally reshapes how speculative fiction is perceived. By documenting successful partnerships between genre writers and organizations like Defence and the UNHCR, the authors create a template for future collaborations and legitimize speculative fiction expertise as valuable for addressing pressing challenges. It opens new professional pathways for Australian genre writers while enriching policy development and strategic planning.

T R Napper, “It’s The People, Stupid” (Human Art in a Company World)

This long form essay discusses AI, creativity, and the importance of human story-telling. Authors are under attack, existentially and financially, by the golem of GenAI, and so this essay is timely.

Alexandra Pierce (Ed.), Speculative Insight: Year 2 (Speculative Insight)

This volume collects the 26 essays published by Speculative Insight across 2025. They are all original essays, and they examine a range of themes and ideas important to science fiction and fantasy literature. The essays include works by four Australian authors, as well as authors from Singapore, Finland, the UK, Ireland, the Phillipines, NZ, and the US. Together, these essays are an important contribution to thinking critically about the SFF genre.

Pidj Sorensen, Growing Thylacine

Growing Thylacine is a speculative roleplaying game about a Thylacine being grown in a vat. Players assume aspects of the thylacine (Teeth, Limbs, Stripes, Pouch) and play through vignettes of the creature’s pre-extinction life, then flash back to the present and play a timed escape from the cloning lab. The game engages with current news about ‘de-extinction’ through the eyes of the creature.

Speculate Emerging Writers Prize (RMIT/EWF)

The inaugural RMIT/EWF Speculate Prize for Emerging Writers is a truly original and unique initiative. We wanted to encourage early career writers to do just that, and help us—judges and readers—do that too. To engage with the world around us, in novel and fabulous ways.

Unique to this prize is the Student Reading Panel consisting of 15 RMIT University students from a range of disciplines. Over the 2024/25 summer, the panel came together to carefully consider and judge over 150 submissions, learning from and championing these aspiring writers from right across the nation. The panel’s considered approach, underpinned by EWF’s mission to build new and developmental opportunities for emerging writers, has resulted in an incredibly varied, bold, and exciting inaugural longlist. It is with immense pride that EWF has been able to mentor and facilitate these student readers, and by doing so, provide emerging speculative writers the time and space to craft, create, and ‘speculate’.

Speculate was explicitly designed as a developmental prize—seeking to champion writing that speaks to the theme in all its complexity and expansiveness—and the diversity of entries reflected this. These longlisted authors have taken our invitation and run with it, through form or content, in more traditional literary modes or less conventional exploratory ones. It was truly a pleasure to read submissions, and a hard task to decide on a shortlist and award a winner. The high calibre of the longlisted stories speculated in inventive, surprising, satisfying and resonant ways, showing the potential of these writers across (and crossing) genres like horror, science fiction, the fantastical, surreal and the absurd!

Louise Zedda-Sampson, “The Horror of Australian Literary Censorship” (Midnight Echo #20, Australasian Horror Writers Association)

Last century, Australia had one of the longest and most extreme censorship regimes in the English-speaking world. The legislation commenced in 1901 and increased in levels of severity until it was finally repealed in the early 1970s. At its peak, it was compared to the censorship regimes found in some third world countries. Using newspaper and other images from the times, the article details the stages of the ban and how at one point in the 1930s publishers pivoted to create a local and thriving pulp fiction culture when American pulp magazine imports were completely banned in Australia. The article is an informative and entertaining illustrated read bringing light this period of Australian literary darkness.