UWA Publishing is excited to announce the two winners of the 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award. The winners are: Chris Brophy for her manuscript Snow and Kimberley Starr for her manuscript being made of stone.
The judges for the 2026 award were 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 winners were chosen from a shortlist of six titles and over 280 entries.
The judges commented that Chris Brophy’s Snow “takes us back to the Australia of the early 1960s, experienced through the eyes of a young girl and her sister. With their mother in a psychiatric hospital and father away for long periods at sea, they grow up in the home of their relatives in a small country town. Following a path laid down by aging photographs, the novel takes us through a painful but often beautiful awakening.”
The judges commented that Kimberley Starr’s being made of stone “opens with a scene of confusion and desperation. A mother has lost her daughter in a crowded art museum in a foreign country. But all is not as it seems. This lost child is the cipher of a deeper loss in the coherence of the world. While a motif of sculpture runs through the novel, the figures of stone cannot quite maintain the permanence they promise.”
Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) is considered one of Australia’s most important writers whose work challenged the norms of twentieth century Australian culture. The winner of the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award was Mohammed Massoud Morsi for his manuscript The Hair of the Pigeon (April 2026) and the inaugural winner Josephine Wilson went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Extinctions.
The $10,000 prize money will be split equally between the two winners and both will be offered a publishing contract with UWA Publishing. UWA Publishing wishes to congratulate Chris and Kimberley on their achievement.
ABOUT THE WINNERS
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.
From Brophy: “I was over the moon when I received news of my shortlisting for this year’s Dorothy Hewett Award, never expecting to actually win. So, to be chosen as co-winner is absolutely the icing on the cake for me. I am also very happy to be sharing the award with Kimberley Starr. I imagine the other shortlisted writers were also hoping to win so to share this good fortune is very welcome to me. It’s so hard to get your first big break as a writer, particularly in today’s competitive and cautious publishing climate. The Dorothy Hewett Award offers a rare opportunity for a newcomer like me, an older, debut novelist, to be published. I am looking forward to Snow being in print and hopefully then connecting and resonating with readers in the way I intended when I wrote it. A big, big thank you to the judges for selecting my manuscript as co-winner. I am completely delighted.”
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.
From Starr: “I'm deeply honoured to have won the Dorothy Hewett Award. In being made of stone, I wanted to tell the story of a woman who insists unyieldingly on her freedom, in the face of so many expectations placed on older women to calm down and to behave. Despite a failing memory, she flees to Italy, to be reunited with the art she has been passionate about for her entire life. She's often confused, but she remains driven by creativity and hope and a refusal to do what everyone expects. It's a story that means a great deal to me and a prize named for Dorothy Hewett feels like the perfect vehicle for sharing it. Awards are a significant way for writers to find readers in Australia and I'm delighted to share this prize with another Australian author. I'm very grateful to the judges and to UWA Publishing for this wonderful opportunity.”
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