DOROTHY HEWETT AWARD ANNOUNCES 2024 WINNER
UWA Publishing and the Copyright Agency is excited to be announcing the winner of the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award: Kaya Ortiz for their unpublished poetry manuscript Past and Parallel Lives.
Kaya will receive a publishing contract and manuscript development with UWA Publishing and $10,000 prize money courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. Past and Parallel Lives will be published by UWA Publishing in 2025.
The judging panel for the 2024 Award was Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Astrid Edwards, Thuy On and Kate Pickard. The judges were heartened by the number of submissions to the Dorothy Hewett Award, well over 200 – across all categories: fiction, narrative non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. More information about the judges can be found on the Dorothy Hewett Award Instagram page.
From the judges: “Past and Parallel Lives is a poetic offering that thrums in liminal spaces. It’s about the migratory experience, the queer body, the unfixed, confused identity carving a space in the world. It’s about borrowed languages, (un)belonging, and attempts of navigating treacherous cultural and racial expectations with courage and grace.”
In 2023, the judges announced Queensland writer Kirsty Iltners as the winner of the award for her manuscript Depth of Field which was published last month by UWA Publishing. The inaugural winner of the award was Josephine Wilson for her manuscript Extinctions which went on to win the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
The Dorothy Hewett Award is open annually to Australian writers of fiction, narrative non-fiction, poetry or memoir and the winner receives $10,000 courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing. The award will reopen for submissions in November 2024.
UWA Publishing sends a warm thank you to the Copyright Agency for its ongoing support for the Dorothy Hewett Award and congratulates Kaya Ortiz on their achievement.
Kaya Ortiz is a queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and record-keeper of ancient histories. Kaya hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and Lutruwita / Tasmania and is obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time. Their writing has appeared in Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Best of Australian Poems 2021 and After Australia (Affirm Press 2020), among others. Kaya lives and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar country, where their name means ‘hello’ in the Noongar language.
Watch the announcement here.
Find out more about the award here.
