Myint wins 2025 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award

James Cook University’s (JCU) Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (FALS) has announced Khin Myint as the winner of the 2025 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award for Fragile Creatures: A Memoir (Black Inc., 2024).

Myint, who wins $50,000 as part of the prize, was chosen from a longlist of 10 and a shortlist of five, and is only the fourth debut writer to win since the award’s inception in 1967.

Based in Perth, Myint’s writing has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Liminal magazine and the West Australian and more. He was also a recipient of the Wheeler Centre’s 2021 Next Chapter program.

Myint said, ‘With a book, you create this beautiful sail, and it catches some wind when the book first comes out. So to win this award I feel incredibly grateful that they’ve given the book this opportunity to help get it out there.’

Judges – Mary Vernon, Susan K Martin, Alan Lawson and Leigh Dale – described Fragile Creatures: A Memoir as extraordinary ‘for its exploration of complicated questions about the relationship between mind and body, medicine, and the role storytelling plays in illness and recovery’.

‘There are many brilliant aspects,’ they said. ‘The striking phrases and elegant structure, used to tell two linked stories; the emotional insight, into the author and those close to him; and the incredible control and judiciousness of tone.’

Last year’s winner was Melissa Lucashenko for her novel Edenglassie (UQP).

More information about the award is available on the JCU website.

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