Writer Elias Greig has been shortlisted in the 2024 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, in the Non-Fiction category for his Overland piece, Freehold!

The Woollahra Digital Literary Award is a national literary award supporting innovation in Australian literature and publishing, encouraging writers producing work in a digital medium. Author and literary translator Tiffany Tsao judged the Non-Fiction category in which Greig has been recognised, and had this to say about the shortlist; There are so many ways in which a nonfiction work can be and do. I found so many of the entries deeply moving, deeply interesting, and deeply insightful. A genuine thank you to all the writers who entered this year.
I was especially struck by the following works for their remarkable demonstration of spirit, stylistic intrepidity, innovative deployment of form, and/or their astonishing ability to connect the dots across memories, events, people, places, and cultural objects.’

The winner in each category as well as the recipient of the Readers’ Choice Award, will be announced at Woollahra Library at Double Bay on Tuesday 26 November, 6-8pm.

Freehold is part of Elias’s current writing project for which agent Danielle Binks signed him to the JdM agency. Tentatively titled The Whale Ghosts: Sketches from a Haunted Country, Greig describes it thus; ‘Avery Gordon writes of hauntings as “those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar […] when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view.” I’m working on an essay collection actuated by ghosts – less apparitions than long, strange causations; vanishings; ruins; fugitive materialities; suppressed, falsified, or kitcshed histories – offered in the hopes of revealing the absences – personal, historical, ecological – that characterise contemporary Australia; that render it a haunted country.’