Episode 4 of Australian Shorts features Laura Elvery. Laura is the author of two short story collections: Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter.

She is a past winner of 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.

Ordinary Matter won the 2021 USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. The judges described it as ‘elegant, inventive, and often deeply touching’. The collection was also shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award.

Laura’s first novel, Nightingale, was shortlisted for the Fiction Book Award and won the People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award at the 2025 Queensland Literary Awards.

Laura has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from QUT. 

In this episode, Laura reads Grand Canyon from her second collection. Hear how Laura combined fact with fiction for this story, why she chose to tell it through Frank’s voice, how she feels about beginnings and endings in stories, how reading your work aloud differs from reading it in your head, and more!

This episode was recorded on the traditional lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people in Meanjin, Brisbane.