Poets dominate University arts awards
Media Release, Friday 26 August 2005
Poets dominated literary and art prizes worth $30,000 awarded by the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre last night.
The awards were presented by the Australian writer Kate Grenville at a Melbourne Writers’ Festival event.
Professor Kate Darian-Smith, Director of the Australian Centre, says “these are the most prestigious non-government literary awards in the country, and they play an important role in fostering Australian writing and ideas”.
Among the prizes was the $10,000 Kate Challis RAKA award, one of the most valuable and sought after prizes for Indigenous art.
This year the Australia Council in partnership with the Australian Centre launched the valuable Asher Literary Award, also valued at $10,000.
This prize is the gift of the late Helen Asher, a refugee from Nazi Germany who found sanctuary in Australia, and who became active in the literary and cultural life of her new home. She specified that the prize should go to a woman writer whose work dealt with an anti-war theme.
Award recipients are:
** Alexander Brown, this year’s winner of the Kate Challis RAKA Award for Indigenous poets. Working with linguist Brian Geytenbeek, Mr Brown collected, translated and assembled songs of the Ngarla People from the Pilbara region in WA (who retain ownership of the songs). The collection has been published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press under the title of Ngarla Songs.
** Jane Williams, a poet who won the $3,500 DJ (Dinny) O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship for emerging Australian writers. Her entry beat 90 others across the genres of fiction, poetry and drama.
** Robert Kenny, who for his manuscript, ‘The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World’ (forthcoming by Scribe Publications), received the $5,000 Peter Blazey Fellowship for a work in progress in the genres of autobiography, biography or life writing. His work is the life-story of the ‘first’ Wotjubaluk youth to be converted to Christianity in Victoria.
** Eva Sallis, who won the $10,000 Asher Literary Award for The Marsh Birds (Allen & Unwin). Sallis’s story of the bewilderment and experiences of refugees is the first winner of this new award for women writers on anti-war themes.
** Bronwyn Lea, an Australian poet who received the $3,500 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. This award provides an opportunity to visit Ireland as an inspiration for writing or for research.
For further information contact Luke Rungie at the Australian Centre on (03)8344 8226 or email lrungie@unimelb.edu.au
Web: www.australian.unimelb.edu.au
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