Steen Raskopoulos could win 'best newcomer' at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Credit:Wolter Peeters The best comedy show award comes with a cheque for £10,000, but Simmons is more motivated by the doors that being on the shortlist is already opening. "It's really exciting," he said. He has been nominated once before, in 2011. But since then, he has worried that he was just flavour of the month, a weird Australian who got lucky. "This time I think it's a sign I'm doing something right, something that's mine," he said. "I am getting a lot more interest in developing things now."

He can't go into details – "it's right in it's infancy" – but after the festival he will go back to the US where he has been trying to get TV projects together. Simmons said he felt he had hit a "glass ceiling" in Australia, despite his well-received 2012 four-episode comedy TV series Problems. "I don't find what I am doing so weird," says the man who stands on stage each night pulling together a narrative involving a windsurfing death, muesli bars, horses' hooves, dearly departed nannas in space and an obscene act with a cardboard dolphin. "It's funny, it's absurd, but we don't celebrate that so much in Australia. It's amazing to be validated in the country which started all that. I grew up on the Goodies." Simmons says he feels he is just hitting his comedy straps.

"I wish I could tell you more," he says about the offers that have started coming in since the nomination. "Some of the meetings were like… fuck!" Raskopoulos says he was taken completely by surprise by his own nomination – he had come to the Fringe with the modest ambition of simply surviving his first Fringe intact. Instead, he started selling out each show after the first week, and now has an award nomination to top it off (winning the same award began Tim Minchin's stratospheric rise in 2005). Raskopoulos began stand-up a few years ago –he was studying improv in Chicago and a mentor and friend "forced" him to do solo stuff, he says – "I just had to prove I could write by myself, I just needed that confidence boost". After a nomination as best newcomer in Melbourne, and then a second sell-out show, he decided to take it to Edinburgh.

"Everyone said if you are going to come here don't assume it will be sunshine and rainbows, know that it's extra hard work and you will have really bad days," he said. "I knew that if I could survive to the end, I would be a better comic and a better writer. I just wanted to challenge myself." Instead, he's having an "amazing time". The only hard aspect is that the Fringe is impossible to escape. In Melbourne you can hop on a tram or find a quiet café. But in a town where 6000 shows are playing at the same time, every bedroom, restaurant and pub is a venue. "You can't really escape, it's like a bubble." The award winners will be announced early Sunday morning, Australian time.

Best Comedy Show: Alex Horne: Monsieur Butterfly James Acaster: Recognise John Kearns: Shtick Liam Williams: Capitalism

Romesh Ranganathan: Rom Wasn't Built in a Day Sam Simmons: Death of a Sails - Man Sara Pascoe: Sara Pascoe vs History Best Newcomer: Alex Edelman: Millenial

Dane Baptiste: Citizen Dane Geins Family Giftshop: Geins Family Giftshop: Volume 1 Lazy Susan: Extreme Humans Lucy Beaumont: We Can Twerk it Out Steen Raskopoulos: I'm Wearing Two Suits Because I Mean Business