I was thrilled to be shortlisted and receive the runner-up prize for the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing for ‘Ghost Species and Shadow Places: Plastic pollution on Lord Howe Island’ first published in Griffith Review.

Melissa Fyfe won first prize for her fantastic longform reporting and profile of Professor Helen O’Connell in ‘Getting Cliterate: how a Melbourne doctor is redefining female sexuality’ first published in Good Weekend. Jackson Ryan was also awarded the runner-up prize for his confronting article ‘How CRISPR could save 6 billion chickens from the meat grinder’ published in CNET.

The shortlisted pieces:

• ‘Getting cliterate’ (Melissa Fyfe, Good Weekend)
• ‘When planetary catastrophe is your day job’ (Lesley Hughes, the Monthly)
• ‘Ghost species and shadow places’ (Cameron Muir, Griffith Review)
• ‘Oceans of krill’ (Stephen Nicol, from The Curious Life of Krill, Island Press)
• ‘How CRISPR could save six billion chickens from the meat grinder’ (Jackson Ryan, CNET)
• ‘A tiny coral paradise in the Great Barrier Reef reckons with climate change’ (Helen Sullivan, the New Yorker).

The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing is an annual prize for the best short non-fiction piece on science written for a general audience, and is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. It is named in honour of Australia’s first Nobel laureates, William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg.

Photos by Maja Baska