Perpetual Stew is an unpublished novel that is shortlisted for the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. In this short interview, with UWA Publishing intern Reilly McGrath, Georgie Harriss shares how it feels to be shortlisted and their advice for writers looking to submit to the Dorothy Hewett Award in the future.
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.
Perpetual Stew is a grotty yet lyrical work of queer autofiction with a touch of surrealist Australiana thrown in. Told from the perspective of a 19-year-old Georgie, the novel interweaves narrative fragments about living with their ninety-four-year-old grandmother and apart from their terminally ill father, developing an eating disorder and losing their best friend to an exotic meat enthusiast, elating in their first queer romance and enduring various breaches of bodily autonomy. Through a playful reinvention of lived experience, this disgusting/delicious soup of a book explores the conflicted nature of embodied existence in 21st Century “Australia”. The 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award judges commented "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."
UWA Publishing intern, Reilly McGrath, interviewed Georgie about their shortlisting:
Reilly: What does being shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award mean to you?
Georgie: I was over the moon to hear I'd been shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award! Perpetual Stew is my first sustained attempt at writing prose so it came as a pretty big surprise. As a writer, I think you're always fighting against your own insecurities – these can be especially strong when you step out of your comfort zone to try something new in terms of content or form. I'm incredibly heartened that the judges saw something promising in my work and I'll be sure to carry that confidence into my future writing practice.
Reilly: How long have you been working on this piece, and what made you want to submit to the DHA this year?
Georgie: I'd been chipping away at Perpetual Stew for over five years and I wrote the vast majority of it during Melbourne's lockdowns (perhaps that's why there's such an intense introspection in its narration). I genuinely believe it's one of those creative projects that I could never have written through self-discipline alone, I had to want to write it... and that meant a lot of waiting around for my creative desire to strike.
My dear friend Alex Creece (an incredible poet, check her out) had read my manuscript and when she saw the callout for the Dorothy Hewett Award, she sent it my way. I'm so grateful she did!
Reilly: Do you have any advice for writers considering submitting their work in to the Dorothy Hewett Award in the future?
Georgie: I think you'll know in your body when your creative work is ready to leave the safe, intimate space of the edit. Try to get in touch with that feeling, and when it comes, don't hesitate to submit. But try not to anticipate the kind of work the judges are looking for, they could surprise you as much as you could surprise them!
Perpetual Stew is an unpublished fiction manuscript shortlisted for the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. The winner will be announced late July.
Reilly McGrath is a former Bachelor of Arts student from the University of Western Australia, with First Class Honours in English Literary Studies.
Check out our interviews with the other 5 shortlisted writers: