The Australian Prize for Fiction is an exciting new prize launched in 2024, which replaces The Banjo Prize. Please click here for more details and to enter. 

HarperCollins launched The Banjo Prize in 2018 in a quest to find Australia’s next great storyteller. The inaugural winner was Tim Slee, whose delightful debut novel Taking Tom Murray Home was published by HarperCollins in July 2019. The 2019 winner was Elizabeth Flann’s incredibly tense Australian thriller Beware of Dogs, published in January 2021. The 2020 winner was Dinuka McKenzie with her gripping contemporary crime novel, The Torrent, published in February 2022, and Veronica Lando won in 2021 with her atmospheric Australian mystery, The Whispering, publishing in July 2022. Steph Vizard won in 2022 with her charming rom-com The Love Contract which was published in September 2023, and the winner in 2023 was Stefanie Koens with her beautiful historical novel, Daughters of Batavia, coming out in 2025.

The Banjo is open to all Australian writers of commercial fiction, offering the chance to win a publishing contract with HarperCollins, with an advance of $15,000. Two runners-up will each receive a written assessment of their manuscript from HarperCollins.

Applicants are required to submit a full manuscript of adult commercial fiction, a short pitch of between one and three sentences, a 500-word synopsis and a 200-word biographical statement. Any Australian resident aged 18 or older is eligible to enter.

HarperCollins Fiction Publisher Anna Valdinger said, ‘We all love being swept away by a great story, whether it’s a tense mystery, an epic historical drama, a story of families and relationships, or an escapist feel-good read. Excellent commercial fiction can span a huge range of genres but at its heart, always, lie characters and stories that stay with you, and make you think and feel. The Banjo Prize is such an exciting opportunity to discover fresh new voices and we can’t wait to see what Australian writers have in store for us this year.’