This year’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize received over 370 entries interpreting the theme of travel in broad and imaginative ways. Given the number of entries, those experimenting with form, language and perspective — or otherwise taking creative risks — were a pleasure to run across.

A number of entries invoked the archetype of a protagonist who experiences an epiphany while travelling in a foreign land. The best stories subverted this trope, or played with it so as to invest it with a sense of newness. Weaker stories fell back on the exoticised Other as a trigger for the narrator’s sudden realisation or change of heart.

The shortlisted stories spanned a range of themes and stylistic approaches, but all were meticulously crafted: irrespective of plot or structure, they were compelling from beginning to end, with evident care for the impression or emotions with which the reader might be left at the final paragraph. These are the kinds of stories that linger; that pack a punch well beyond their word count.

Rachel Ang, “Thalassophobia”

“Thalassophobia” is a searching, poignant story about parenthood, racialisation, and uncertain futures. In precise, closely observed prose that gestures to the emotional depths below, Ang’s narrator moves through liminal spaces — a writers’ festival, the back of a taxi, a tourist beach — while meditating on the life of the artist.

Jo Langdon, “Off”

A mother sets off with her child to attend a kids’ birthday party in the park — the daughter of an old friend. From this simple premise, Langdon crafts a tense, unsettling narrative; a deftly drawn portrait of fraught relationships and suburban anxiety. As its understated title suggests, the story’s characterisation is subtle and its dialogue economical, yet “Off” perfectly captures the dawning dread and rancour of a friendship going sour.

Aneeta Sundararaj, “Harvard Estate Is”

Through an inventive patchwork of testimony, official documents and sharply drawn vignettes, Sundararaj remembers the lives and deaths of indentured labourers on a plantation in British Malaya. Woven into this remembering is a contemporary story — a daughter trying to make sense of histories that deny easy categorisation as positive or negative, lovely or terrible.