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UWAP announces 2019 Dorothy Hewett Award shortlist

15 November 2018   Books+Publishing
@booksandpublishing

UWA Publishing has announced the shortlist for the 2019 Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.

The shortlisted authors and their works are:

  • Angela Rockel for ‘Rogue Intensities’, a memoir ‘grounded in Tasmania’, spanning human, nature and environmental themes. ‘It manages to straddle the intimate and the universal with ease and a great deal of delight.’
  • Mandy Beaumont for ‘She is Bright Light and All Brilliance’, a ‘dazzling’ collection of short stories about the lives of women (and men) in love and in ‘the sometimes desperate state of sexual desire and fulfillment’.
  • Kristen Lang for ‘The Unspoken Economy’, a poetry volume that ‘journeys through diverse and complex landscapes, and evokes vivid imagining and meaning of place for the reader’.
  • Clyde McGill for ‘The Blue Skirt’, a ‘work of great ambition and formal daring’, written in a stream of unpunctuated prose. ‘It bends words into strange new shapes, revels in the textures and rhythms of language, confronting the reader with a cascade of deliberately disorienting and scabrous observations.’
  • Christine Kearney for ‘The Book of Eels’, a novel set in Timor Leste that addresses the power of colonial actions and government shenanigans. ‘It always reaches back to the human, giving the reader a clear-eyed view into the entwinements of Timorese and Australian people, in love and conflict.’
  • Oliver Driscoll for ‘A Time of Great Forgiveness’, a novel written in an ‘unadorned and unemotive style, but infused with an understated melancholy and a self-deprecating sense of irony’. It follows a young student and aspiring writer as he walks the streets of Melbourne, ‘reflecting on his personal relationships and his intellectual ambitions, observing himself and others with a wry detachment that captures the ambivalence of youth’.

The winner, who will be announced in Perth in February 2019, will receive $10,000 and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing. The award was expanded this year to offer eligibility to all Australian writers and permanent residents. Writers and manuscripts are no longer required to have a ‘connection to Western Australia’.

This year’s judging panel includes UWA Publishing director Terri-ann White, UWA academic Elfie Shiosaki, and author and contributing editor of the Sydney Review of Books James Ley. Poet Julie Watts won the award last year for her poetry manuscript, ‘Legacy’.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, UWA Publishing announced in June that the Dorothy Hewett Award would retain its name, following allegations made by Hewett’s two adult daughters that their mother encouraged a culture of sexual exploitation during their adolescence.

For more information, see the UWA Publishing website.

 

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Category: Awards Local news