NT Writers Festival program; Aurealis, Hugo finalists; Global Book Crawl destinations
Some event details were released this week – so have your calendars ready: The Northern Territory Writers Festival has announced its 2025 program, which will run 29 May–1 June on Arrernte Country, Mparntwe/Alice Springs; while the Australian Library and Information Association has announced ‘To Read or Not to Read: Literacy Matters’ as the theme for this year’s Library and Information Week, running 28 July–3 August.
Meanwhile, in bookselling news, the Australian arm of the Global Book Crawl – an international initiative to ‘unite independent bookshops worldwide in a celebration of local literature, community, and culture’ – will include more than 60 bookstores across seven regions; and Collins is opening a new franchise store in Queanbeyan.
Also in New South Wales, the State Library of New South Wales has announced a refurbishment of its Macquarie Street building, leading to some temporary closures until later this year.
Speculative fiction made the award headlines twice this week, as finalists for the Aurealis Awards and Hugo Awards were revealed – the latter of which featuring two Australian editors and two Australian illustrators. And, on a more broadly speculative note (spanning fiction and nonfiction and much in between), RMIT and the Emerging Writers’ Festival announced the longlist for the Speculate Prize for Emerging Writers.
Shortlists were revealed for the Australian Book Review‘s Calibre Essay Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the latter of which features three writers from Aotearoa New Zealand and three from Australia.
Three prize winners were also announced locally this week: Rachel Ang won the 2024 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize for their story ‘Thalassophobia’; Beejay Silcox won the inaugural KYD Flash Fiction Prize for her story ‘‘Mefloquine’; and Neika Lehman won the 2024 Judith Wright Poetry Prize for their poem ‘The Dog House’. And the Little Book Press, the publishing arm of Raising Literacy Australia, announced the 2025 recipients of its relaunched mentorship program: Garth Cochrane and Meg Riley.
In local acquisitions news, PRH Australia acquired ANZ rights to Reece Carter’s new middle-grade series The Nightmare League, in a six-publisher auction brokered by Gemma Cooper from Gemma Cooper Literary; Upswell acquired world rights to Fourteen Ways of Looking, a ‘hybrid memoir/prose poem/history’ by Erin Vincent, with US and UK rights already sold; Hardie Grant acquired world rights to Wankernomics by James Schloeffel and Charles Firth; and Atria Books Australia acquired world rights (ex North America) to poet Courtney Peppernell’s debut novel, The Last Poem.
Meanwhile, overseas, a surfeit of awards news: Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the Women’s Prize Trust announced the Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award, a ‘one-off literary honour’ to be awarded to a living female author ‘in recognition of her body of work and significant contribution to literature’. The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction announced the shortlist for the $150,000 (A$236,675) prize; Haruki Murakami won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award Cultural Personality of the Year award ‘for the immense literary influence held by his work over the Arab literary world’; and the 40th annual Whiting Awards, recognising emerging writers, have also been awarded.
In less buoyant news, the American Library Association released its list of the 10 most challenged books of last year, in the midst of an ongoing spike in the number of books challenged.
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Category: This week’s news
