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Barbara Jefferis Award 2022 shortlist announced

22 August 2022   Books+Publishing
@booksandpublishing

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has announced the shortlist for the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award, worth $50,000.

The shortlisted titles are:

Named for the author Barbara Jefferis, a founding member and executive director of the ASA, the biennial award recognises ‘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’.

‘We were struck by the intersectional nature of gender as reflected in so many of the stories, and the way that race, class, sexuality, identity and culture were inseparable from the characters’ experiences,’ said 2022 judges Toni Jordan (chair), Peggy Frew and Declan Fry, adding that this year’s prize was ‘also notable for the large number of very good short-story collections represented’.

In 2022 the judges included a ‘Highly Commended’ list ‘to acknowledge both the tightness of our field, and also those writers whose wonderful work was the subject of our admiration’.

The highly commended titles are:

  • She is Haunted (Paige Clark, A&U)
  • A Million Things (Emily Spurr, Text)
  • The Performance (Claire Thomas, Hachette).

The judges said they were ‘pleased to find women and girls of all ages appearing in the entries, especially the number of excellent novels featuring girls as protagonists’, and noted ‘the scarcity of work submitted by authors who identify as men’, speculating that ‘this might genuinely represent the number of Australian men writing novels in which women and girls are depicted positively, or merely be a reflection of their publishers’ judgement as to their likelihood of winning’.

The judges said the shortlisted and highly commended works ‘distinguished themselves by freshness of their perspective, the urgency of their theme and, in many cases, the extraordinary empathy the writers brought to the lives of their protagonists’.

The 2020 winner of the award was Wolfe Island (Lucy Treloar, Picador). The 2022 winner, to be announced on Thursday 22 September, will win $50,000, with a further $5000 to be distributed among the other shortlisted authors.

For more information, see the ASA website.

 

Category: Awards Local news