Announcing the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award shortlist

UWA Publishing, with the support of the Copyright Agency, is excited to be announcing the shortlist for the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. The shortlist is as follows:

Clutch Feathers, Draw Breath by Corrie Hosking
Perpetual Stew by Georgie Harriss
The Hair of the Pigeon by Mohammed Massoud Morsi
Laughing River by N. J. Madden
you are HERE by Roderick Poole
Bad Westerns by Tim Loveday

The judges for the 2025 award are Tony Hughes-d’Aeth (UWA Chair of Australian Literature), Kate Pickard (UWAP publishing manager), James Jiang (editor for Sydney Review of Books), and Caitlin Maling (WA poet). This year, the shortlist has been chosen from over 300 entries. The judges commented that the shortlisted titles stood out for the sharpness of their vision and their creative amplitude.

In 2024, Kaya Ortiz was announced as the winner for their unpublished poetry manuscript Past & Parallel Lives which was published by UWA Publishing in March 2025. Previous winners include Kirsty Iltners (QLD) and Brendan Ritchie (WA). The inaugural winner of the award was Josephine Wilson for her novel Extinctions which went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The award is named after Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002), one of Australia’s most important writers, whose work challenged the norms of 20th century Australian culture. The Dorothy Hewett Award is open to Australian writers of fiction, narrative non-fiction and poetry and the winner will receive $10,000 courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing.

UWA Publishing sends a warm thank you to the Copyright Agency for its ongoing support for the Dorothy Hewett Award and wishes to congratulate all the shortlistees. The winner will be announced in July 2025.

Shortlisted writers

Corrie Hosking

Corrie Hosking lives with family in the Adelaide Hills, committed to restoring Kaurna Country, edging Peramangk. Her early writing achieved various awards and publications. Regardless, artists need income, so Corrie became a Social Worker, tending children in Care through trauma-informed Play & Narrative Therapy. Recent years saw Corrie return to creative practice. Fascination for this drive led to Artists’ Residencies, inspiring ‘Clutch Feathers, Draw Breath’ an illustrated work of fiction exploring our need for connection and creativity – with environment, with one another. This manuscript was awarded Matilda Bookshop’s inaugural Deep Creek Fellowship, including the uplift of Hannah Kent’s mentorship.

Judges' comment

"Fretted with fine illustrations, Clutch Feathers, Draw Breath is a gently ruminative work of fiction exploring human fragility, fragmentation, and the therapeutic dimensions of art. Through its refreshing suspensions of syntax and pointillist accretion of sense impressions, the work’s lyrical sensibility nevertheless remains grounded in the vicissitudes of the body and the earthiness of domestic life."

Georgie Harriss

Georgie Harriss is a queer writer, theatre-maker and researcher based in Naarm. They’re the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, an ATYP National Mentorship and a City of Melbourne writer’s residency. Their play Love Bird has been staged at both The Butterfly Club and La Mama; the script was published by In Case of Emergency Press in 2022. They have a PhD in creative writing from Monash University through which they developed queer and pleasure-centred frameworks for rescripting lived experiences of trauma. They currently lecture in screenwriting at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Judges' comment

"Savagely observant and charmingly transgressive, this coming-of-age story follows the interior life and misadventures of nineteen-year-old Georgie as they come to terms with their sexual self. As Georgie copes with their father’s grave illness, their own body’s blunt demands crash into the paradoxes of their desire. The novel’s prose flares out from the embers of this collision."

Mohammed Massoud Morsi

Mohammed Massoud Morsi is an Egyptian-Danish-Australian photographer, journalist and writer. His work has been published in all three of his traditional languages. Morsi discovered journalism made people yesterday’s news and turned to writing novels instead. He has a talent for reaching to the heart of existence in a complex world and looks to important questions, finding that which is quintessentially human within much broader struggles. His work is enriched by his photographer’s eye for detail and a passion for speaking out for those suppressed, challenging and breaking common narratives all at once.

Judges' comment

"In the tangled streets of millennial Damascus, Ghassan and Sama are childhood friends. As they grow into adulthood in the convulsions of the Arab Spring, violence erupts intimately into their lives. The fatality of these days, between regimes and in the shadow of violent expulsions, plays out with the precision of a primal scene. This gripping novel speaks powerfully to the moment we are in."

N. J. Madden

N. J. Madden is a Naarm-based writer. Madden’s debut novel, Laughing River, was shortlisted for the Unpublished Manuscript Award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2024. He was among the writers selected for the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship for 2025 and has also been a featured artist at the Emerging Writers' Festival. Madden studied literature at university, focusing on eco-criticism which deeply influences his work.

Judges' comment

"A captivating road novel set during what appears to be the Victorian gold rush, Laughing River chronicles the hardening of a young boy into an inveterate survivalist, as he drifts from one locale to the next, changing names and companions along the way. Through its tightly controlled narration and subtle
music, the novel, like its characters, is charged with a powerful reticence that gives each burst of violence or tenderness an almost mythic resonance."

Roderick Poole

Roderick lives and works in Melbourne. He had some plays produced last century. This is his first novel.

Judges' comment

"A virtuosic novel from the eyes of Roo – a resident of Northcote Town – in a future climate and disease ravaged version of the suburbs of Melbourne, you are HERE is unlike any novel in contemporary Australian literature. At base, this is a love story, between Roo and Ju-Ju, for the community of Northcote Town and for music, all under threat from the technological advances of the HERE corporation."

Tim Loveday

Tim Loveday is a poet, writer and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation and climate collapse. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, came runner-up in the 2024 Cloncurry Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, the 2024 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Prize, the 2024 Best Australian Yarn and the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Tim teaches creative writing at Unimelb and RMIT. He is a current PhD candidate in creative writing at Unimelb. Find out more at: timloveday.com

Judges' comment

"Singing with the many vocabularies of masculinity in rural Australia, Bad Westerns is a deceptively rough book of poetry and a skilled lyric exploration of the interplay of violence and tenderness. Avoiding anthropocentrism, Bad Westerns insists on considering how these human interactions are embedded, intertwined and encroaching on the extra-than-human."

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