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Saunders among ASAL academic, criticism award winners

Tuesday, 1 July 2025   Books+Publishing
@booksandpublishing

The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) has announced winners of a suite of academic and criticism prizes.

Walter McRae Russell Award

  • Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius (Thomas H Ford & Justin Clemens, Melbourne University Press)

This award is presented for the best book of literary scholarship on an Australian subject published in the preceding two calendar years.

The organisation described the book as ‘remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is the way the book intervenes in both poetics (which it does with rigour and originality) and with history’.

Alvie Egan Award

  • The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean (Dashiell Moore, Oxford University Press)

This award is presented for the best first book of literary scholarship by an early career researcher on an Australian subject, published in the preceding two calendar years.

The organisation said that this book ‘develops both concrete and figurative connections between its two titular nodal points’, adding that it is ‘a fine work of association as much as of comparison.’

Rosemary van den Berg Prize for First Nations Criticism ($5000)

  • ‘Think of the Children!’ (Mykaela Saunders, Sydney Review of Books)

This prize is awarded biennially to celebrate a work of criticism written by a First Nations critic in Australia.

In its announcement, the organisation said, ‘This piece is an outstanding work of criticism: culturally grounded, original, and not beholden to other analysis. […] This is a work of criticism that is seated in cultural authority and provides a searching, illuminating reading of the experience of reading [Alexis Wright’s novel Praiseworthy] and its conceptual and formal achievements. It sets a benchmark for critique when engaging with First Nations–authored work. We congratulate Mykaela Saunders for this, and [for] her contributions to criticism more broadly.’

More information about the awards and the winners is available on the ASAL website.

 

Category: Awards Local news