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Queensland Literary Awards 2025 winners announced

Monday, 29 September 2025   Books+Publishing
@booksandpublishing

The winners of the 2025 Queensland Literary Awards have been announced.

Amy McQuire has won the $30,000 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance for Black Witness (UQP). Judges celebrated Black Witness for its ‘outstanding scholarly rigour and moral clarity’. The judges added, ‘Grounded in meticulous evidence, it offers a powerful indictment of systemic injustice and underscores the need for truth-telling. This is a vital contribution to Indigenous scholarship and the national reckoning we so urgently need.’

Chosen from shortlists announced earlier this month, the winning titles in each category are:

Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance ($30,000)

  • Black Witness (Amy McQuire, UQP)

Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Awards
(Two awards of $12,000 each, plus career development support to the value of $3,000 each)

  • Alex Philp
  • Sean West

Queensland Writers Fellowships
(Two fellowships of $20,000 each, plus career development support to the value of $4,500 each)

  • Mykaela Saunders for ‘Dear Uncle’
  • Vuong Pham for ‘Reborn’

The University of Queensland Nonfiction Book Award ($15,000)

  • Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions (Clare Wright, Text)

The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award ($15,000)

  • Rapture (Emily Maguire, A&U)

Young Adult Book Award ($15,000)

  • Don’t Let the Forest In (CG Drews, Hodder Children’s)

Children’s Book Award ($15,000)

  • Little Bones (Sandy Bigna, UQP)

Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection ($17,500)

  • The Oblong Plot (Chris Andrews, Puncher & Wattmann)

David Unaipon Award for an Emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Writer ($20,000)

  • ‘Finding Billy Brown’ by ES Crismani

Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer ($15,000)

  • ‘Commonplaces’ by Gillian Hagenus

The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award ($15,000)

The total value of the awards now stand at $261,000, down from $276,000 in 2024.

The winners were announced at a ceremony at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) on 26 September 2025. The ceremony was originally scheduled for 12 September, but was delayed after multiple judges withdrew from the judging process, reported the Brisbane Times, in protest of the cancellation of KA Ren Wyld’s black&write! fellowship.

‘The winners of this year’s awards provide us with the opportunity to wrestle with big ideas that provoke and inspire, reminding us of the power of literature to spark debate and connect people of different perspectives,’ said SLQ state librarian and CEO Vicki McDonald.

‘Congratulations to all this year’s winners, who are now part of a long and distinguished history of writing and storytelling in Queensland that stretches back millennia.’

Last year’s winner of the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance was Melissa Lucashenko for Edenglassie (UQP).

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

 

Category: Awards Local news