Dunedin writer Pam Morrison has won an international short story award, beating 900 entries from Ireland, Ukraine, France, Kenya, South Korea, Italy, China and other nations to be named winner of a prize directed by Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter.
The 2025 Lorian Hemingway short story competition is run from Key West, Florida, open to writers whose fiction has not appeared in a nationally distributed publication with a circulation of over 5000. It was created in 1981. That first year, the contest drew 75 entries from Key West and a few other cities in Florida. It’s now one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes for new and emerging writers. Pam Morrison wins US$1500 for her story ‘One Small Bird’.
“Pam is a rare and splendid talent,” reported author Trish Gribben, who passed on the news of the Hemingway win to ReadingRoom. Morrison has worked as a senior lecturer at Otago Polytechnic in social sciences, and as a therapist with a private counselling practice. She lives in Dunedin, and has a bach in a restored church in Pigroot, also known as State Highway 85 from Palmerston to Alexandra.
I got hold of Morrison and asked for her writing background. She started work as a journalist and retrained as a counsellor and psychotherapist in her 40s. During the plague year of Covid, she enrolled in a writing course with author Michelle Elvy.
She said, “Michelle introduced me to flash fiction, and I was away. I loved the form, and was in a flash fiction group of three women for three years, each of us responding every month to the same three prompt words. I’ve found being in groups with other writers to be enormously encouraging and motivating.
“In my late 30s I had put my hand to some poetry and sent my first clumsy batch of poems to Lauris Edmond, who responded with a generous hand-written two-page letter of encouragement and feedback. My love for poetry was reignited through a summer school poetry course with Sue Wootten, and I have continued to write poems. I now belong to a group of Dunedin poets called the Dromedaries, and we recently set up our own press. I have been trying my hand at short stories over the last couple of years, and am really enjoying the challenge of deepening the storyline.”
To win an international writing prize in honour of one of the great masters of the short story is no small achievement. Lorian Hemingway herself is an author—she has written a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction book nominated for a Pulitzer—but she stages the contest for short stories in honour of her grandfather. Ernest Hemingway was a genius of short fiction. His reputation never really recovered after Jeffrey Meyer’s massively critical 1985 biography, which gave Hemingway a sound thrashing in almost every page of its 600-page portrait of a drunken bullying asshole who was cruel, abusive, insecure, obscene, anxious, and died by suicide when he got up at 7am on a Sunday and walked to the basement of his house in pyjamas and bathrobe to load a 12-gauge shotgun. There is life and death, and there is also the work you leave behind: Hemingway’s best stories, and there are a lot of them, will always remain masterpieces, beautifully detailed magic tricks where you get a strong, profound sense of things off the page.
A genius, but nasty as all hell. In one interview, Lorian Hemingway said, “I distanced myself so much from Ernest back when I was a teenager. In fact, I had this working wrath against him for how he had dissed F Scott Fitzgerald.” She means the awful portrait Hemingway wrote about him in his strange memoir A Moveable Feast, with its vile little scene of the two writers going to the men’s bathroom after he claims Fitzgerald confided in him, “Zelda said that the way I was built I could not make any woman happy. She said it was a matter of measurements.” Hemingway invites him to the bathroom. He inspects his friend’s apparatus. He gives him advice on how to make love. What rotten pages, with Hemingway thinking himself a wise and all-knowing master of sex, not caring that he emasculates Fitzgerald as a nervous wreck.
“It saddens me that there were so many things written about Ernest Hemingway where he was not supportive of other writers and went out of his way to sort of kick them,” Lorian Hemingway has said. “I hope to amend some of that if possible.” Her short story prize is a kind of amendment.
Interesting woman. Like her grandfather, she had problems with alcohol. Like her grandfather, she had problems with her father, Gregory; both Ernest Hemingway and Lorian Hemingway were estranged from Gregory Hemingway, who had a sex change late in life and became Gloria Hemingway. Lorian Hemingway has spoken of a phone call when her father asked her, “What if your father became your mother?”
Her father died of heart failure in a police cell after being arrested for indecent exposure. Police had found Hemingway wandering naked along a median strip in Key Biscayne, carrying a dress and high heels. Lorian Hemingway: “If there was anything good about those last hours, it was that he was in the women’s cell, where he would have chosen to be.”
All of which is likely not unfamiliar territory for contest winner Pam Morrison, with her work in psychotherapy and counselling. But it’s her other passion, her other expertise, that connects her to the Hemingways: writing. Her award-winning short story will be published in a US literary journal that partners with the contest, Cutthroat.
Lorian Hemingway says of the winning entries of her prize: “There’s nothing more exciting than finding something of brilliance.”
Pam Morrison says of winning the prize: “Amazed, surprised, delighted at news of the win. It’s been a real boost to my confidence as a writer, and a joy too, to have my story being read more widely. I’d had placings in international competitions in past years for two flash fiction pieces but longer fiction is new for me. The prize has been validating and spurs me on to do more in this genre. I’m very grateful to Lorian Hemingway.”
