Industry responds to rescinded black&write! fellowship, de Krester wins 2025 Stella Prize, ABDA winners announced
Across the industry this week, B+P reported on the State Library Victoria’s published ‘Ways of Working Commitment’ and outlined the events leading up to this document including the cancellation of the 2024 Teen Writing Bootcamp workshops; the National Simultaneous Storytime (NSS) hosted 2,204,658 participants in 16,632 locations to read The Truck Cat (Deborah Frenkel, illus by Danny Snell, HGCP); the Melbourne Writers Festival reported a 47% year-on-year increase in revenue for the 2025 festival program; and the Jacky Winter Group announced the creation of new literary agency Gildlings, which will focus on ‘picture books, graphic novels and illustrated literature’.
Rosetta Books on the Sunshine Coast announced an upcoming merger with Annie’s Books on Peregian; in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Luna Foundation announced its inaugural writers residency for women writers; and Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt (Te Herenga Waka University Press) became the first Aotearoa New Zealand title to hit number one across all book sales; also in Aotearoa New Zealand, B+P reported on independent publisher Damien Levi’s analysis of 2023 publishing data on gender and ethnicity in published books in Aotearoa, following earlier work by writer Janis Freegard.
In response to the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) rescinding Ren Wyld’s black&write! fellowship after Premier David Crisafulli and Arts Minister John-Paul Langbroek voiced concerns, several judges for the Queensland Literary Awards have resigned in protest; in addition to this, literary journal Overland is hosting an open letter from First Nations storytellers to the SLQ and Langbroek; the Australian Society of Authors has also written a statement expressing alarm. B+P republished Jo Caust’s piece in the Conversation – ‘A First Nations writer’s fellowship was withdrawn by Queensland’s government. What’s going on?’ – contextualising the withdrawal of the black&write! fellowship.
In awards news this week, Michelle de Kretser won the 2025 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for Theory & Practice (Text); Melissa King won the inaugural Speculate Prize for Emerging Writers for her short work ‘The Bungalow’; Lionel Fogarty won a 2025 Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement; the Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA) announce the winners of its annual awards; and the Mary Gilmore Award 2025 shortlist was announced.
Looking at festival updates, ABC Radio, Fremantle Press, UWA Publishing, Magabala Books and Boffins Books have announced the program for the Big Day of Books Perth in lieu of the Perth Writers Festival.
In acquisitions news, Penguin Random House acquired ANZ rights to Monica McInerney’s new novel, When Sullivan Met Lola, and nonfiction title Girl on a Roof, via Fiona Inglis at Curtis Brown; Transit Lounge acquired ANZ rights to Adam Ouston’s second novel, Mine, via Martin Shaw at Shaw Literary; and Atria Books acquired world rights to BookToker and ex-NRL player-turned-Bachelor Luke Bateman’s debut fantasy series in a two-book deal, via Sean Anderson and Tim Wall at 22 Management. Affirm Press also announced a partnership with Your Kid’s Next Read to launch a junior fiction series aiming to ‘encourage the joy of reading’.
Around the world, the International Publishers Association has expressed alarm at reports of Russian publishing professionals arrested for distributing titles containing ‘LGBT propaganda’; the €100,000 (A$174,939) international Dublin Literary Award announced The Adversary by Michael Crummey (Knopf) as the 2025 winner; in the UK and Ireland, the 2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize shortlist has been announced; the Tadeusz Bradecki Foundation announced the inaugural winner of the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize is Clare Pollard for The Modern Fairies (Penguin); in the Atlantic, Berez and Warzel unpacked the use of AI to generate book lists in newspapers, which was also noted in 404media. In New York Times, Alyce McFadden reported on the sentencing of Hadi Matar, the man convicted of attempting to stab author Salman Rushdie to death. Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the attack that left Rushdie ‘critically injured and blind in one eye’.
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Category: This week’s news
