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Aman, Brabon named joint winners of the David Harold Tribe Fiction Award

Writers Claire Aman and Katherine Brabon are the joint winners of the 2019 David Harold Tribe Fiction Award, worth $12,000.

The award 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’.

Aman, who is based in Grafton, NSW, won for her story ‘If there are zebra finches’, which charts the research trip of two scientists and their tour guides on a motorcycle journey through the Tanami Desert. The judges said Aman’s story is of ‘remarkable lightness and movement, beautifully imagined and written with deceptive simplicity’.

Brabon, who is based in Melbourne, won for her story ‘The Pool’. The judges said Brabon’s story, in which a young woman arrives in Berlin for a three-month stay with her partner, is ‘an entirely fresh narrative about the relationships between bodies and places’, calling it ‘a spellbinding story about the boundaries between what is real and imagined, the self and others, body and mind’.

Aman and Brabon were chosen as the winners from 280 submissions. The other shortlisted authors were Jack Bastock, for ‘How to read your dreams’; Paige Clark, for ‘She is haunted’; and Peter Newall, for ‘Cherry Vareniki’.

The winning stories will be published in Southerly in 2020.

The judging panel for this year’s award included University of Sydney creative writing lecturer Beth Yahp, and authors Mireille Juchau and Bernard Cohen.

The David Harold Tribe Fiction Award is part of an awards program that alternates each year between fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture and symphony. John Scott won the last fiction award in 2014.

 

Category: Awards Local news