Dorothy Hewett 2023 shortlist announced

UWA Publishing (UWAP) has announced the shortlist for the 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript. The winner receives $10,000 prize money, as well as manuscript development and a publishing contract with UWAP.

The shortlisted works are:

• ‘The Bone Singer’ by Christine Bell, which ‘tenderly evokes the aftermath of the Great War through the eyes of Hugo Maitland, a soldier who has volunteered with the Australian War Graves Detachment to recover bodies of fallen Australians in the Somme’
• ‘Depth of Field’ by Kirsty Iltners, in which ‘the camera becomes the encryption of what is known and what escapes the frame. With its casually clipped first-person narration, and alternating narrative perspectives, Depth of Field asks questions about the reliability of memory and the conditions of representation’
• ’99 Names’ by Lukas Jackson, a ‘visceral coming-of-age story’ set within the families of Sydney’s Lebanese diaspora that ‘vividly evokes the impasses of migrant experience and how these refract through generations’
• ‘Along the Lightning Ridge’ by Nakita Kitson, a ‘powerful historical novel set near the southern capes of Western Australia in the early colonial moment. It is a sensitive reimagining of the interface between colonial femininity and its encounter with the radical difference of people and environment’
• ‘The Hum Hearers’ by Shey Marque, ‘brilliantly observational and meditative’ poems that ‘detonate like muffled explosions’, in which ‘generational trauma is counterbalanced by hidden wells of resilience and subterranean solidarities’
• ‘Francesca Multimortal’ by Val Colic-Peisker, ‘a daring and profound novel that cascades through the reincarnations of Francesca as she lives out her lives at pivotal points in European history’, opening up ‘the dimensions of life and how it is to be a woman’
• ‘Semblance’ by Vivienne Glance, ‘a big-hearted eco-novel set within the battle to save the southern forests of Western Australia’ that ‘unfolds as a powerful crime story, but one which asks us to fully understand the nature of crime in the Anthropocene’.

The 2023 shortlist was chosen by judges Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Astrid Edwards, Thuy On and Kate Pickard from more than 220 entries.

Previous recipients of the Dorothy Hewett Award include 2022 winner Brendan Ritchie for his novel Eta Draconis, 2021 joint winners Joshua Kemp and Kgshak Akec for their respective books Banjawarn (submitted as ‘Strangest Places’) and Hopeless Kingdom, 2020 winner Karen Wyld for Where the Fruit Falls, and the inaugural winner, Extinctions by Josephine Wilson, which went on to win the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

For more information about the Dorothy Hewett Award, see the UWAP website.

Category: Awards Local news