THE DOROTHY HEWETT AWARD

The 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award closed for submissions on 30 November 2024. The shortlist will be announced mid-2025.

The Dorothy Hewett Award is a national award for unpublished manuscripts and is run annually in the month of November. The award is open to all writers who have completed a manuscript and are seeking publication regardless if they have been published before or not. The work must be currently unpublished and belonging to one of these genres: fiction, narrative nonfiction, poetry, verse novel or memoir. The winner will receive a cash prize of $10,000, courtesy of Copyright Agency, and will be offered a publishing contract by UWA Publishing. Full submission guidelines can be viewed in the Terms and Conditions below.

The winner of the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award is Kaya Ortiz for their poetry collection Past and Parallel Lives which will be published by UWA Publishing in 2025. Past winners include Kirsty Iltners (2023 winner) for Depth of Field, Brendan Ritchie (2022 winner) for Eta Draconis, Kgshak Akec (joint 2021 winner) for Hopeless Kingdom, and Josh Kemp (joint 2021 winner) for Banjawarn (submitted as Strangest Places). The inaugural winner, Extinctions by Josephine Wilson, went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) is considered one of Australia’s most important writers whose work challenged the norms of twentieth century Australian culture. In 1986, Hewett was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to literature. Hewett won the Western Australian Premier’s Poetry Award in 1994 and 1995 for her collections Peninsula and Collected Poems: 1940-1995.

Terms and conditions can be viewed here. Please direct any queries to admin-uwap@uwa.edu.au

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