Showing all posts about literary awards
2022 ABA Booksellers Choice Awards shortlist
28 April 2022
Eighteen titles across three categories, adult fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books, have been named on the 2022 ABA Booksellers Choice Awards shortlist. After Story by Larissa Behrendt, Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, and Love & Virtue by Diana Reid, are among contenders for the fiction prize. Winners will be announced on Sunday 12 June 2022.
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Australian literature, literary awards
Nicholas Wasiliev speaks to Stella Prize shortlist writers
19 April 2022
Sydney based author and podcaster Nicholas Wasiliev, and host of Booktopia’s podcast, Tell Me What To Read, speaks to Evelyn Araluen, Lee Lai, Eunice Andrada, Jennifer Down, and Anwen Crawford, who are five of the six authors to have work shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
The 2022 Stella Prize shortlist
3 April 2022
The shortlist for the 2022 Stella Prize was announced on Thursday 31 March 2022. The six titles, the work of Australian women and non-binary writers, along with an excerpt of the judges’ comments for each book are as follows:
Bodies of Light, by Jennifer Down.
This is an ambitious novel, spanning decades and locales, that sees Down demonstrate her imaginative range and take risks following the success of her previous two books. The result is a daring and compelling work, suffused with pathos and an impressive degree of empathic vulnerability.
Dropbear, by Evelyn Araluen.
Dropbear is a breathtaking collection of poetry and short prose which arrests key icons of mainstream Australian culture and turns them inside out, with malice aforethought. Araluen’s brilliance sizzles when she goes on the attack against the kitsch and the cuddly: against Australia’s fantasy of its own racial and environmental innocence.
Homecoming, by Elfie Shiosaki.
Homecoming is both a genre-defying book, and a deeply respectful ode to the persistence of Noongar people in the face of colonisation and its afterlives… Shiosaki has delivered a work of poetic and narrative genius and can be read either as an ensemble of poems or as a single piece that moves seamlessly between the elegiac and the joyful.
No Document, by Anwen Crawford.
No Document is a longform poetic essay that considers the ways we might use an experience of grief to continue living, creating, and reimagining the world we live in with greater compassion and honour… This work is a complex, deeply thought, and deeply felt ode to friendship and collaboration.
Stone Fruit, by Lee Lai.
Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit is a moving graphic novel in which queer couple, Bron and Ray, find themselves at a tense crossroads in their relationship. Throughout scenes rendered in Lai’s signature art style – simple lines and a muted blue and grey colour palette – and featuring spare, perfectly articulated dialogue… Stone Fruit beautifully reflects a tender domesticity that is affecting and atmospheric.
Andrada’s collection adroitly combines the personal, the political, and the geopolitical, narrated by a voice that is at once hip, witty, and deeply serious. Andrada has the imaginative ability to move between the memories of poet-narrators, historical asides, reflections on the nature of race and feminism in Australia, and questions of colonisation both locally and in the Philippines. Formally remarkable, stylistically impressive, and often surprising, TAKE CARE is a collection that understands the ways in which ‘There are things we must kill / so we can live to celebrate.’
If the Stellas are about finding writing that mixes it up and shakes it around a bit, then the contest for this year’s Prize is going to be fascinating.
In the past novels, non-fiction, biographies, and memoirs have won, but in 2022 works of poetry have a better than average chance of prevailing, with the work of three poets in the shortlist.
Then of course there is Stone Fruit, Lee Lai’s graphic novel. Bring on Thursday 28 April, the day the winner is announced I say.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
The Best Australian Yarn Short Story Competition 2022
30 March 2022
The Best Australian Yarn is another generous local literary award currently accepting submissions for short stories of between 1500 – 2500 words.
Short stories have the power to transport us to another world, they educate and entertain us, and can make the everyday seem extraordinary.
A collaboration between The West Australian and the Minderoo Foundation, entries for The Best Australian Yarn are open until Tuesday 31 May 2022, to Australians everywhere aged twelve or over.
A total of A$50,000 in prize money is on offer. The overall winner will be awarded A$30,000, the West Australian winner A$4,000, Regional Australia winner $3,000, the Youth winner will received $2,000 and mentoring opportunities, while the nine shortlisted entrants will received A$1,000 each.
In addition, the winner of the Readers’ Choice award, as determined by a public vote, will receive A$2,000. The longlist, consisting of fifty works, will be announced in August 2022.
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Australian literature, literary awards
The Barbara Jefferis Award 2022
30 March 2022
Entries are open for the biennial Barbara Jefferis Award, to commemorate the life of the late Australian author, who died in 2004. The literary prize was established in 2007 through a bequest from Jefferis’ husband John Hinde, an Australian broadcaster and film critic, who died in 2006.
The Barbara Jefferis Award is offered biennially for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.
With a prize A$50,000 for the winner, and a further A$5,000 shared among those named on the shortlist, the award is one of the richest in Australian literature. Entries close on Monday 9 May 2022, with the shortlist scheduled to be announced in August.
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Barbara Jefferis, literary awards, literature
2022 Indie Book Awards winners
22 March 2022
Love Stories by Trent Dalton, and Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, are among the 2022 Indie Book Awards winners that were announced yesterday, Monday 21 March.
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books, literary awards, literature
2022 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) longlist
22 March 2022
The 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards longlist (ABIAs) was announced this afternoon.
It’s a big field, with close to one hundred contenders spread across twelve categories including New Writer of the Year, Small Publishers’ Children’s Book, International Book, General Non-fiction Book, and my personal favourite: Literary Fiction Book of the Year.
The Australian Book Industry Awards, or ABIAs, which were established in 2006, recognises the work “of authors and publishers in bringing Australian books to readers.” The shortlist will be released on Monday 23 May, with the winners being named at a ceremony on Thursday 9 June 2022 in Sydney.
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books, literary awards, literature
The Stella Prize and the difference it has made
21 March 2022
The winners of Australian literary award, the Stella Prize, which recognises the work of Australian women and non-binary writers, talk about how the now decade old prize transformed their writing careers, and Australian literature.
Clare Wright is an academic at La Trobe University, and she says winning the Stella was invaluable to her burgeoning career as an author. “Stella really gave me a platform, and it gave me a microphone, and people wanted to hear the things that I had to say – about not only the subject of that book, but also about women in history, about history writing, about gender relations more broadly,” she says.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
Stella Prize longlist 2022, a good year for poetry
1 March 2022
Unlike the Miles Franklin Literary Award, which honours only works of fiction by Australian writers, the Stella Prize recognises writing across all genres, be it fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, graphic novels, biographies, historical writing, short story collections, novellas, and poetry.
In addition to the fiction and non-fiction works named on the Stella Prize longlist for 2022, Stone Fruit by Montreal, Canada based Australian cartoonist Lee Lai becomes the first graphic novel to be included on the longlist.
But it is the poets who have a made a mark this year, claiming four of the twelve slots on the longlist. Take Care by Eunice Andrada, Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen (cover featured above), Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki, and The Open by Lucy Van, are all in contention for the prize.
If one of the poetry titles wins, or Lai’s graphic novel, it will be a first for the Stella. A shortlist consisting of six titles will be unveiled on 31 March 2022.
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Australian literature, graphic novels, literary awards, poetry, Stella Prize
The 2022 Stella Prize longlist
28 February 2022
The 2022 Stella Prize longlist was announced today, and includes the following twelve books:
- Another Day in the Colony by Chelsea Watego
- The Open by Lucy Van
- Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki
- Permafrost by SJ Norman
- Stone Fruit by Lee Lai
- Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss
- Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down
- No Document by Anwen Crawford
- She Is Haunted by Paige Clark
- Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen
- Take Care by Eunice Andrada
- Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah
The Stella Prize, which was established in 2013, is a literary award celebrating the writing of Australian women. The shortlist will be announced on 31 March 2022.
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