Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Book Awards 2025 winners announced

The 2025 Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writer Awards winners have been announced.

Winners, selected from shortlists announced in July, are:

Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Nonfiction ($10,000)

• Jana Vytrhlik for Treasures of Old Jewish Sydney (Longueville Media)

Jewish Independent Young Jewish Writers Award ($5,000)

• Ellie Bouhadana for Ellie’s Table (Hardie Grant)

Szymon (Simon) Klitenik Award for Jewish Fiction ($5,000)

• Linda Margolin Royal for The Star on the Grave (Affirm).

Among other winners, Elise Hearst won the Edith Hausmann Award for Jewish Playwrights, while the Rosalind Sharbanee Meyer Award for Young Jewish Storytellers was awarded to Hayley Kaplan in the short story category and Mimi Baron for poetry.

Judges commended Vytrhlik for an ‘extraordinary work of historical recovery’ and Bouhadana for ‘a weaving of cultural memory into the textures of inherited cuisine’. They also praised Royal’s novel for ‘freshness in its approach, using family secrets, buried grief and how we make sense of loss to preserve history, while addressing themes of identity, resilience and healing’.

The Australian Jewish Book Awards, first run in 2024, recognise excellence in contemporary Australian writing on Jewish subjects, and aim to promote the reading of these texts and to inspire and support current and future Australian authors on Jewish subjects.

Last year’s inaugural winners included Michael Gawenda for his memoir My Life as a Jew (Scribe) and Anna Jacobson for her poetry collection Anxious in a Sweet Store (Upswell).

Category: Awards