How to Enter:

1. Read the Terms and Conditions

2. Buy your entry via the online bookshop

3. Submit your entry via the electronic form

Judges

For the Tasmanian Writers’ Prize 2027, Forty South is collaborating with TasWriters, an organisation dedicated to supporting, connecting, and advocating for Tasmania’s aspiring, emerging, and established storytellers. Our three judges are all current board members who give their time voluntarily to the writing community.

Growing up in regional Tasmania and privy to many yarns spun over fences and at local gatherings, Meahd Farnaby has always had a love of storytelling and reading and would often be found under the shade of a tree, nose in a book. Her passion for words and literacy has grown throughout a range of roles including community development, project/event management, marketing, writer, guiding, gardening and teaching English as an additional language both in Tasmania and overseas. She gets joy from creating and being part of events supporting our literary community including festival coordinator for Hobart Writers Minifest 2026, co-admin coordinator Tamar Valley Writers Festival 2024, and marketing and production roles in various other cultural festivals.

Meahd loves to chat all things books and does this through a regular spot on ABC Radio Hobart, as well as moderating literary panels and interviewing authors for their launches and book clubs. She sits as chair for TasWriters and deputy chair on the management committee of A Fairer World (a diversity and inclusion organisation). She also still sits under trees reading.

Judith Ridge is internationally recognised as one of Australia’s leading experts on literature for children and young adults. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Judith has worked as an English teacher, teacher librarian, children’s book and magazine editor, youth arts program coordinator and teacher of creative writing. She is the commissioning and contributing editor of The Book That Made Me (Walker Books 2016).

Judith has worked with the Sydney Writers Festival, Northern Rivers (Byron Bay) Writers Festival and the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. Her board experience includes the Australian Society of Authors and the NSW Branch of the Children’s Book Council. She coordinates the writing group Write Here Launceston, and is a member of the Community Cultural Advisory Group for City of Launceston. Judith is a Churchill Fellow and a PhD Candidate, having recently submitted her thesis on Australian children’s fantasy fiction.

Leigh Swinbourne is a dramatist and fiction writer resident in Nipaluna/Hobart. His work has been shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award, the Varuna Award and The Tasmanian Literary Prizes. He has six plays published with Australian Plays Transformed. He has published two critically acclaimed collections of short stories, The Shark (2011) and Away  (2014), and a novel, Shadow in the Forest (2019), all through Ginninderra Press. In 2023 he was awarded an Australian Society of Authors mentorship for a second novel. In 2024 he published his third collection of stories, The Lost Child, which was longlisted the 2025 Premier’s Prize for Fiction. More on Leigh’s writing can be found at www.leighswinbourne.com.au.