David Brooks wins 2025 Patrick White Literary Award
Poet, writer, and academic David Brooks has won the $20,000 Patrick White Literary Award for 2025.
Award trustee Perpetual described the award as “a richly deserved recognition of [Brooks’s] profound and wide-ranging contributions to Australian literature, contemporary poetry, and environmental thought”.
Born in 1953 in Canberra, Brooks spent his childhood in Greece and Yugoslavia before returning to Australia, where he was educated at ANU. He studied his MA and doctorate at the University of Toronto and taught at a range of institutions before his retirement in 2013. He is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, four volumes of short stories, and four works of nonfiction that explore the ethical and emotional dimensions of the human–animal relationship. His work has won or been shortlisted for major prizes across many genres, including most recently a Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2025.
The judging committee, comprising Sarah Holland-Batt (chair), Sophie Cunningham and Elizabeth McMahon, said in their citation, “Brooks’s contributions to Australian literature have been profound, but perhaps because his oeuvre has been spread across so many different forms and genres – each with its own audience – his output has not always been readily appreciated in its totality. The Patrick White Literary Award is a hugely deserving recognition of David Brooks as an outstanding Australian writer, thinker, scholar, educator who has had a major influence on contemporary poetry and environmental thought. The judges hope that recognising Brooks’s work with this honour will encourage more readers and writers to his stellar body of work, and thank him for his gifts to Australian writing.”
Brooks said, “This is a very special award and means a great deal to me: that it cannot be applied for; that it’s assessed by a panel of one’s peers; that it’s not given for a particular book but recognises work in numerous genres and over a long stretch of time. Its first recipient [Christina Stead] was a remarkable novelist whose work I’ve always admired; its second [David Campbell] was a friend, a major poet of the landscape I was born into, and wrote one of my all-time favourite poems. Since then the list of recipients has included many of the best and most interesting Australian writers of the last fifty years. I never expected to be in such company, am greatly honoured, and a little stunned, to find myself there, but, like a cat who suddenly discovers it’s got ten lives after all, will do all I can to confirm my place.”
Author Patrick White established the annual literary award – using the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature – to advance recognise authors who have “made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition”.
Brooks will be honoured for his contribution to Australian literature at the Patrick White Literary Award celebration at Gleebooks on Monday 10 November 2025.
The winner of the 2024 Patrick White Literary Award was π.ο. A full list of winners is here.
Category: Awards Local news
