Episode 3 of Australian Shorts features Laurie Steed. Laurie’s short fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing, The Age, Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, Island and elsewhere. 

Laurie edited the short story anthology Shibboleth and Other Stories, published in 2016. His debut novel You Belong Here was published in 2018 and shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. His memoir, Love, Dad, was published in 2023. Laurie’s collection of short stories, Greater City Shadows, won the 2021 Henry Handel Richardson Fellowship for Short Story Writing and was published in 2024. 

In this episode, Laurie reads The Punch. Then we talk about how this story came into being and Laurie tells us why it’s easier to take risks with short stories and talks about the joys and pitfalls of writing across literary forms, and the long game of writing.

This episode was recorded on the traditional lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people in Meanjin, Brisbane, and on the lands of the Whadjuk Nyoongar people in Boorloo, Western Australia.