Fremantle Press appoints judges for 35th Hungerford Award

Chemutai Glasheen, Marcella Polain and Richard Rossiter are the 2026 Hungerford Award judges. Alongside Fremantle Press publishers Georgia Richter and Cate Sutherland, they will be responsible for choosing who will win the $15,000 prize money from the City of Fremantle, a publishing contract with Fremantle Press, and a Centre for Stories Fellowship.

The biennial Hungerford Award is Western Australia’s most prestigious award for an unpublished work of adult fiction, narrative non-fiction or young adult fiction by an unpublished writer. This year, for the first time, verse novels will also be eligible to enter.

As in previous years, the judges won’t know who is behind the work that has been submitted, with every manuscript judged anonymously and on its own merits. Richard Rossiter will be judging the award for his twelfth time and Chemutai Glasheen for her first.

Georgia Richter is excited to work with the judges to identify debut Western Australian writers with the talent and manuscript to win the Award. She says, ‘We’ll be celebrating thirty-five years of the Hungerford this year and, after more than fifteen years of judging it, I can tell you there is nothing more satisfying than reading a manuscript you can’t put down. In the last three rounds alone, it was thrilling to read for the first time Holden Sheppard’s Invisible Boys; to find hope and connection in Molly Schmidt’s Salt River Road and to be uplifted by Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes’ prose and poetry memoir Trials of Hope / (የተስፋ ፈተና).’

Longest standing guest judge Richard Rossiter says the quality of the writing is consistently high across all genres, and each year he wants to tell many of the entrants to keep going because there is so much writing talent in Western Australia.

Newest guest judge Chemutai Glasheen says,  ‘It’s an absolute honour to be included in the judging panel for the Hungerford Award. We live in fascinating times, and I cannot wait to see what piques the interest of fresh voices and how they write their way through it.’

Marcella Polain says she has worked with emerging writers for decades, and always looks forward to the surprise and privilege of reading new manuscripts.

Submissions for Western Australia’s most prestigious award for an unpublished work will open on Friday 6 February 2026 and close at midnight AWST on Sunday 15 March 2026. For the full terms and conditions, or to browse books by previous winners, go to the Hungerford Award page. https://fremantlepress.com.au/submissions/hungerford/

About the judges

Chemutai Glasheen lives in Western Australia. She is a teacher and a sessional academic at Curtin University. She writes fiction for young people, and her work is influenced by her interest and experience in human rights and education. She has written a collection of short stories which are set in east Africa.

Her creative work has been published in Unlimited Futures (Fremantle Press), Meniscus Volume 9 Issue 2 and in ACE: Arresting Contemporary Stories by Emerging Writers.  She holds a PhD in creative writing from Curtin University. Her book I Am the Mau and Other Stories (Fremantle Press) made the International White Ravens List in 2024, was a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book and was shortlisted for a Western Australian Premier’s Book Award.

Marcella Polain (she/her) lives and works on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. She was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia with her Armenian mother and Irish father. She is the author of Driving into the Sun (Fremantle Press, 2019) and The Edge of the World (Fremantle Press, 2008), which was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her most recent poetry collection is the seven-eight count of unstoppable sadness (Puncher and Wattmann, 2023). In 2015, she was awarded the gold medal by the Writers’ Union of Armenia. Marcella is now an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at Edith Cowan University, and is also an editor and mentor.

Richard Rossiter lives in Perth, Western Australia, and is an Honorary Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University. Richard has taught literary studies, supervised postgraduate creative writing students and judged numerous writing awards (including the WA Premier’s Book Awards). He has published a range of critical and biographical works focused on WA writing. His fiction publications include Arryhthmia: Stories of Desire (2009), Thicker Than Water (2014) and Refuge (2019), all with UWA Publishing.  He has judged the Margaret River Short Story Competition and edited the short story collections: The Trouble with Flying and other stories (2014); Knitting and other stories (2013); and Things That Are Found in Trees and other stories (2012).