The judges of the 2019 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript are delighted to announce the six shortlisted writers.
Rogue Intensities Angela Rockel (Tas)
Rogue Intensities is a memoir grounded in Tasmania, with a richness of storytelling which emerges from the spaces between human, nature and environmental thread. It manages to straddle the intimate and the universal with ease and a great deal of delight.
She is bright light and all brilliance Mandy Beaumont (Vic)
She is bright light and all brilliance is a dazzling collection of short stories spinning around the lives of women (and men) in love and in the sometimes desperate state of sexual desire and fulfillment. It is a beautiful, dangerous dance of longing, where lives can be made complete when it goes well.
The Unspoken Economy Kristen Lang (Tas)
The Unspoken Economy is a volume of poetry which journeys through diverse and complex landscapes, and evokes vivid imagining and meaning of place for the reader. There is a crispness and precision in the lines of these poems that draws us in to feel, insistently, that all of these concerns matter.
The Blue Skirt Clyde McGill (WA)
The Blue Skirt is a work of great ambition and formal daring. Written in a stream of unpunctuated prose that recalls such doyens of high modernism as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, it bends words into strange new shapes, revels in the textures and rhythms of language, confronting the reader with a cascade of deliberately disorienting and scabrous observations.
The Book of Eels Christine Kearney (ACT)
The Book of Eels is a novel set in Timor Leste that foregrounds relationships and understandings both intimate and in the power of colonial actions and government shenanigans. It always reaches back to the human, giving the reader a clear-eyed view into the entwinements of Timorese and Australian people, in love and conflict.
A Time of Great Forgiveness Oliver Driscoll (Vic)
A Time of Great Forgiveness is a novel written in an unadorned and unemotive style, but infused with an understated melancholy and a self-deprecating sense of irony. It describes the travails of a young student and aspiring writer as he walks the streets of Melbourne, reflecting on his personal relationships and his intellectual ambitions, observing himself and others with a wry detachment that captures the ambivalence of youth.
The judges for the 2019 award are Terri-ann White, Director UWA Publishing; Elfie Shiosaki, Lecturer in the School of Indigenous Studies at The University of Western Australia; and James Ley, author and contributing editor of Sydney Review of Books.
A ceremony will take place in February 2019 in Perth to announce the winner of this Award.
The Dorothy Hewett Award is open to all writers who have completed a manuscript and are seeking publication. The work must be fiction, narrative nonfiction or poetry, inclusive of hybrid genres such as verse novels or memoir. The winner receives a cash prize of $10,000, courtesy of Copyright Agency, and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing.