Announcing the 2025 Shortlist for the Human Rights Essay Prize
After careful deliberation, the shortlist for the 2025 Human Rights Essay Prize has been decided. Congratulations to those who have been shortlisted. Thank you to everyone who submitted an essay and to the readers and donors who make this prize possible. The winner and runner up will be announced shortly. 2025 Shortlist (in no particular order):
Chibueze Darlington Anuonye: ‘Go Tell it to White People’
Ashna Hedge: ‘Six Women – Decolonising Reproductive Healthcare in Australia and Beyond’
Rachel Desiree Felix: ‘Daughters of Silence’
Sabia Rasool: ‘The Blind Side’
Amritha Mohan: ‘Swimming Away from Marriage and Other Arrangements’
Patrick Hannan: ‘The Circumstances in Which They Come”
Alifya Maheswari Putri W: ‘The Future Won’t Be Lonely’
Yoga Prasetyo: ‘Migrations and the Traps of Legality’
Susan Francis: ‘No End in Wandering Mazes’
Clare Brown: ‘No Pride in Humanitarianism’
Scherezade Siobhan: ‘The Invisible Subject’
All shortlisted essays will be published in a new edition of Portside Review coming soon.
About the Judges
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean writer and activist. She’s the managing editor of Mekong Review, a quarterly Asia-focused literary magazine. She also runs We, The Citizens, a newsletter covering Singapore from a rights-based perspective. In 2024, she won the Portside Review Human Rights Essay Prize for her essay ‘Singapore Will Always Be At War’ on Singapore’s harshly punitive drug policy.
Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes is a writer, poet and human rights academic from Lalibela, Ethiopia. He currently lives in Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia) where he is the Director of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. His academic and creative work revolves around African traditions, Ethiopian philosophy, epistemic justice, issues of looted manuscript repatriation, and the politics of language and belonging. His bilingual memoir/poetry collection የተስፋ ፈተና / Trials of Hope won the 2024 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award and will be published by Fremantle Press in 2026.
John Ryan specialises in education, social justice and cultural literacy, and has been published widely. John’s work focuses on Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies and addresses the relevance of LGBTIQ+ social justice in relation to contemporary global culture, education and modernity as reflected in Australian literature, genre studies and creative writing, and the ficto-critical voice.
