Panel - The Joy of writing Short Stories with Strong Characters - Saying more with less

Short stories can knock readers around (in a good way) and hold entire worlds. Taking care with a few thousand words is the hallmark of the sorts of short stories that move and delight readers.

Laura Jean McKay and Laura Elvery – both award-winning short fiction writers – will discuss beginnings, endings, revision, and reveals. 

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country - winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2021. The French translation, Les animaux de ce pays, won the 2025 Prix Gargantua. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia, and her latest collection is Gunflower. She was the 2025 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow to Cork, Ireland, and teaches Creative Writing at Massey University. Laura Jean McKay who was shortlisted for the prestigious Stella Prize in 2021 for The Animals in That Country. The book, which features a pandemic that allows humans to communicate with animals, was also recognized by many other major awards. Laura has written widely including about animals - human and more-than-human.

Laura Elvery is the author of Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter, which won the 2021 USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award. Laura has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Fair Australia Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, Nightingale, won the People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award at the 2025 Queensland Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the Fiction Book Award. Laura has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from QUT. She lives in Brisbane. 

Kristina Olsson is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Her 2009 novel The China Garden won the Barbara Jefferis Award and was shortlisted for the Kibble Prize. Her 2013 memoir, Boy, Lost, garnered multiple awards including the Queensland, New South Wales and West Australian Premiers awards for non-fiction and the Kibble Prize. Her most recent novel, Shell, launched the legendary Scribner Australia literary imprint and was shortlisted in several major literary awards. She is currently working on a memoir set in Sweden and northern Norway that tracks the life of another lost child.

Discover more about the Eumundi Writers Festival here: https://eumundiwritersfestival.com.au/