After taking a 24-year hiatus from fiction writing, Averil got back into it in late 2022. She ventured an entry in the Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction competition in December 2022, for which she was longlisted. She now enters the competition every month, and has had one piece shortlisted and four longlisted.

Averil has decided to use 2025 to pull back from short-story competitions and focus on long-form fiction. However, she couldn’t completely help herself and was a finalist in the 2025 Romance Writers of Australia Ripping Start competition, and longlisted in the Not Quite Write January 2025 flash fiction comp. She had a microfiction story published in Short | Poto, published by Massey University Press in 2025 – seeing her work in her country’s indigenous language is her proudest moment in writing so far. You can read a copy of the story, ‘Choices | He kōwhiringa’ on Newsroom. She was also longlisted in the Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction comp for April 2025. As a hangover from 2024, her short story ‘Living Beyond the Line’ was longlisted in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This prize was on her bucket list from age 16 so hitting the longlist after only her second time trying (the first time being in 1998) was a moment of tremendous pride. Meanwhile, Averil has completed her second novel.

2024 was a huge year for Averil. In June, Averil was awarded first place in the Ethel Webb Bundell Short Story Awards for her story Tree Change. In the same month, she was longlisted in the Furphy Literary Awards and had her short story The Retreat published in The Outback Volume 9. Earlier in 2024, Averil was shortlisted in the Northern Beaches Writers Competition, and in the Flash 5oo Short Story Competition. In September 2024, everything changed when her unpublished manuscript, The Calm After the Storm, was longlisted in the The Richell Prize 2024, run by Hachette and the Emerging Writers’ Festival. In October, she made the shortlist. Also in October 2024, her short story What Needs To Be Done was shortlisted in the Scarlet Stiletto Awards 2024 with Sisters in Crime. Finally, in November, her short story Defiantly Interesting was longlisted for the Best Australian Yarn competition.

In May 2023, her short story Motutaratahi was listed as a finalist in the Tasmanian Writers’ Prize 2023; this story was published in the Forty South Short Story Anthology 2023 in October 2023. Motutaratahi forms the base of Averil’s first novel, The Calm After the Storm, which is currently shortlisted for The Richell Prize 2024. She is seeking an agent and/or publisher for this work of crime-y contemporary women’s fiction, which focuses on themes of criminality and punishment, mental health, deportation, and what ‘home’ means.

More broadly, Averil uses humour, relatable characters and realistic dialogue to bring to life stories that focus on difficult pasts (and presents), mental ill health, and socio-political and gender issues. Averil draws heavily on her own experiences with anxiety and depression, and expat life, to inform her characters’ struggles.