UWA Publishing is excited to announce the shortlist for the 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award. The shortlist is as follows:
Shedding Skin by Faiza Bokhari (WA)
Snow by Chris Brophy (VIC)
A Bird is a Small God by Alisha Brown (NSW)
Another Sky by Christy Collins (VIC)
being made of stone by Kimberley Starr (VIC)
Milk Fever by Coby Sullivan (QLD)
The judges for the 2026 award are Tony Hughes-d’Aeth (UWA Chair of Australian Literature), Linda Martin (co-publisher of Night Parrot Press), Samuel Bernard (literary agent at Zeitgeist Agency), and Kate Pickard (publisher of UWA Publishing). This year, the shortlist has been chosen from over 280 entries. The judges commented that the shortlisted titles exhibited a remarkable variety and depth of talent.
The winner of the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award was Mohammed Massoud Morsi for his manuscript The Hair of the Pigeon (April 2026). Past winners include Kaya Ortiz for Past and Parallel Lives; Kirsty Iltners for Depth of Field; and Brendan Ritchie for Eta Draconis. The inaugural winner, Extinctions by Josephine Wilson, went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) is considered one of Australia’s most important writers, her work challenging 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 and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing.
UWA Publishing wishes to congratulate all the shortlistees. The winner will be announced in August 2026.
ABOUT THE SHORTLISTEES
Faiza Bokhari is a Pakistani-Australian writer whose short fiction has appeared in Djed Press, Roi Fainéant Press and Portside Review, among other publications. She completed a Hot Desk Fellowship at the Centre for Stories in 2023 and was awarded an Early Career Fellowship there in 2025. Her work was published in the Centre's anthology All of Our Selves. Most recently, one of her stories received the Judges' Choice selection in the 2026 RUSSH Literary Showcase. She holds a master’s degree in psychology and works as a UX Researcher.
Chris Brophy has worked as a teacher, librarian, arts administrator and cultural heritage researcher. She has a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing from Melbourne’s RMIT University. Her short stories have been shortlisted for, or won, various awards including an ABC Radio National Award for Regional Writers and the City of Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Short Story prize. In 2016, she was the recipient of a Publisher Introduction Program residency at Varuna and has twice been shortlisted for Overland’s Fair Australia essay prize.
Alisha Brown is a poet living on unceded Gadigal Country. She won the 2025 Finding Beauty Poetry Prize and the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize, placed second in the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published or forthcoming in Best of Australian Poems, Palette Poetry, Westerly, Griffith Review, Island, Cordite, and Meanjin, among others.
Christy Collins’ novella The End of Seeing won the Viva La Novella Prize in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award and the Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Prize. Her novel The Price of Two Sparrows was published in 2021 by Affirm Press. Christy was an Asialink Arts Resident in Sapporo in 2017 and a resident at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai in 2024. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Tasmania and lives in Melbourne/Naarm.
Kimberley Starr is a Melbourne writer and teacher, the author of The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies (UQP), winner of the Queensland Premier’s Award for Best Manuscript, selected for One Book One Brisbane; The Book of Whispers, winner of The Text Prize; Torched (Pantera Press), shortlisted for the Davitt Award for Best Crime Novel; and most recently, The Map of Night (Pantera Press). She has also written for The Griffith Review and The Age. Kimberley recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at La Trobe University. Her current manuscript, being made of stone, tells the story of an Australian artist in Florence and asks what remains when memory and language begin to fail.
Coby Sullivan lives on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. Published in flash fiction and short stories, Milk Fever is her debut novel. Coby has a degree in journalism and completed the Writing A Novel course with Faber Writing Academy. Drawn from her own experience, Milk Fever shines a light on the lesser-talked-about realities of early motherhood and is designed to start a conversation she believes too many families are still having alone.