UWA Publishing author, Kaya Ortiz, has been named the inaugural winner of the Dr Charmaine Papertalk Green Smith Prize for Poetry in the 2026 WA Premier's Book Awards.
Kaya's debut collection Past & Parallel Lives won the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award, was shortlisted in the 2026 NSW Literary Awards, and was commended for the Five Islands Prize for a first book of poetry in 2025. The judges for the WA Premier's Book Awards described the collection as "a boundary bending work that balances muscular language with playfulness of form. While deeply personal, it speaks beyond the self, making its emotional landscape accessible and affecting."
Following a rigorous judging process involving writers, industry professionals and readers from across Australia, the full list of 2026 winners are:
- Book of the Year and Emerging Writer of the Year - CryBaby by Mabel Gibson
- Children’s Book of the Year - Creature Clinic by Gavin Aung Than
- Young Adult Book of the Year - A Murder is Going Down by Kate Emery
- Fiction Book of the Year - O’Keefe by David Whish-Wilson
- Non-Fiction Book of the Year - Tjukurrpa Kurranyu, Tjukurrpa in the Front: The Yarnangu Foundation for Joint Management in the Pila Nature Reserve by Jan Turner and Dr Lizzie Marrkilyi Giles Ellis
- Dr Charmaine Papertalk Green Smith Poetry Prize - Past & Parallel Lives by Kaya Ortiz
- The Daisy Utemorrah Award, sponsored by Magabala Books - Barefoot Running (unpublished manuscript) by Amanda Lott
Find out more about the awards on the State Library of Western Australia website.
Purchase Past & Parallel Lives
