David Harold Tribe Fiction Award winner announced

Novelist and poet John A Scott has won the David Harold Tribe Fiction Award for his short story ‘Picasso: A Shorter Life’.

The award, worth $12,000, is offered by the University of Sydney’s Department of English through the David Harold Tribe Charitable Foundation. It is ‘designed to encourage the writing of fiction and promote interest in Australian fiction generally’ and is open to writers nationwide.

‘The judges agreed that John Scott’s “Picasso: A Shorter Life” was a worthy winner,’ said Kate Lilley, associate professor and director of creative writing at the University of Sydney. ‘Its numbered prose passages form an arresting poetic biography of Picasso and his unfortunate lovers, at once spare and melodramatic, elegant and brutal.’

Scott explained that his winning tale ‘tells, in a series of vignettes, the story of how the artist destroyed the lives of his wives and mistresses’, adding that ‘the more I researched into his activities, the more I disliked him’.

The judging panel for this year’s award included Australian author and University of Sydney graduate Fiona McFarlane and author and literary journalist Ed Wright.

The David Harold Tribe Fiction Award is part of an awards program that alternates each year between fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture and symphony. Patrick Mountford won the inaugural fiction award in 2009 for his short story ‘Theobald, Tailor’.