Kelada wins UWAP’s Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript

Melbourne-based writer and academic Odette Kelada has won UWA Publishing’s (UWAP) Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript for her novel ‘Drawing Sybylla’.

Kelada receives $10,000 and a publishing contract with UWAP. The judging panel, comprising author Lucy Dougan, critic James Ley and UWAP director Terri-ann White, described the novel, which depicts Australian women writers, as an ‘intense reading experience’.

‘[The novel] wears its significant research very lightly and provides the reader with a tremendously original and imaginative set of pictures about the ideas of creativity and usage in making stories,’ said the judges. UWAP will publish it in October.

The authors of two highly commended works also receive a cash prize and a publishing contract: Carolyn Abbs for her poetry collection ‘The Tiny Museums’; and Ann-Marie Priest for her nonfiction account of the careers of Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, ‘A Free Flame’.

The other shortlisted authors were Karen Han Throssell for her work of nonfiction ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There;’ Rachael Mead for her poetry collection ‘The Flaw in the Pattern’, and Christopher Hill for his novel ‘The Savage Club’.

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Category: Local news