2023 judges
Fiction
Helen Elliott is a prominent literary critic and journalist and the editor of Grandmothers. Her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Australian, the Age, Griffith Review, Best Australian Essays, Vogue and numerous other publications. Her most recent book is Eleven Letters To You, a profoundly original memoir, published by Text in 2023. She was the literary editor of the Herald Sun and has two children, four granddaughters and an acre of garden.
Jennifer Down is a writer and editor. Her debut novel, Our Magic Hour, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. The story collection Pulse Points won the 2018 Readings Prize and the 2018 Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. She was named a Sydney Morning Herald Novelist of the Year in 2017 and 2018. Bodies of Light, her second novel, won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
Roanna Gonsalves was born and brought up in Mumbai, India. She attended St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and came to Australia in 1998 as an international student. Her writing has been compared to the work of Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri. She is the author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP), published in India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger). The Permanent Resident won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize 2018 and was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award 2018.
Children's literature
Johanna Bell is an award-winning children’s author, poet and Churchill Fellow. Her second picture book Go Home Cheeky Animals! created with deaf artist Dion Beasley, was awarded the CBCA Picture Book of the Year (Early Childhood). Their latest collaboration, Cheeky Dogs: To Lake Nash and Back was shortlisted for the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Johanna lived in the Northern Territory for many years and recently moved to nipaluna / Hobart where she’s working on a verse novel about climate grief and birds.
Ambelin Kwaymullina is an author, illustrator and academic who comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She tells stories across a range of forms including poetry, essays and speculative fiction novels. Her work has been published across the globe and she is a previous winner of the Aurealis Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Özge Sevindik was born in Turkey, grew up in America and lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She is the co-founder of The Right Pen Collective and the director of the Australian Muslim Writers Festival.
Özge holds an honours degree in Journalism from University of Wisconsin and a Master of Information Studies in Children’s Librarianship from Charles Sturt University.
She was the head librarian for a P-12 school and currently works at a Victorian Public Library. She was the inaugural intern of the Annabel Baker Literary Agency and worked at ABA as the submission coordinator in 2022.
Her work appeared in Meanjin Online, The Guardian, Peril Magazine, and The Victorian Writer. She is the co-author of the two Hijabi Girl junior fiction books published by Ali Gator.
Young adult literature
Isobelle Carmody is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy, children’s, and juvenile literature. She began work on the Obernewtyn Chronicles when she was fourteen. The first two books in the series were short listed for the CBC Children’s Book of the Year in the Older Readers category; The Gathering was joint winner of the 1993 CBC Book of the Year Award and the 1994 Children’s Literature Peace Prize. Greylands won a White Raven at Bologna, and Billy Thunder and the Night Gate was shortlisted for the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature in the 2001 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Both Little Fur and A Fox Called Sorrow received BAAFTA Industry Awards for design and Alyzon Whitestarr won the coveted Golden Aurealis for overall best novel at the Aurealis Awards. The Red Wind, which she wrote and illustrated, won Book of the Year in the CBC awards. In 2020 she completed her PhD at the University of Queensland and then did a doctoral fellowship with the Creativity and Human Flourishing Project at UQ. Her most recent published novel is The Velvet City.
Rebecca Lim is an Australian writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer and the author of over twenty books, including Tiger Daughter (a CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award-winner), The Astrologer’s Daughter (A Kirkus Best Book and CBCA Notable Book) and the bestselling Mercy.
Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish and Vietnamese.
She is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative to support emerging young adult and children’s authors and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ and/or living with disability, and co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction.
Sean Williams is a #1 New York Times-bestselling, multi-award-winning author of over sixty books and one hundred and twenty shorter publications for readers of all ages. His published works include series, novels, stories and poems that have been translated into multiple languages for readers around the world. He has collaborated with other authors, including Garth Nix, was part of an expedition to Casey research station in Antarctica, and is Discipline Lead of Creative Writing at Flinders University, South Australia. For more info: www.seanwilliams.com
Non-fiction
Catherine Noske is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Western Australia. She served as Editor of Westerly Magazine from 2015 until this year, and now continues to support the magazine as Associate Editor. Her work has been awarded the AD Hope Prize, the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers, and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2015). She has judged the ALS Gold Medal, the WA Premier’s Book Prize and the TAG Hungerford. Her debut novel, The Salt Madonna (Picador 2020), was shortlisted in the 2021 WA Premier’s Book Awards.
Paul Cleary is a leading Australian author and researcher whose work has driven reforms that have made Australia’s tax system fairer. After a decade of reporting on economic policy in the Canberra press gallery he studied in the UK as a Chevening Scholar and then became an adviser to Timor-Leste on resource negotiations. He is the author of six books mainly focused on resource conflicts and policy, as well as a best-selling WWII history. The New Yorker praised Too Much Luck as a ‘fierce, concise book’ that showed how Australia’s resources wealth was being ‘classically mismanaged’. His latest book, Title Fight, was shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s literary award. He now works with a First Nations community in remote Western Australia.
Anna Krien is the author of Night Games, Into the Woods, and the Quarterly Essays Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals and The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock. Her debut novel, Act of Grace, was published in 2019.
Australian history
Penny Russell FAHA is an emeritus professor of History at The University of Sydney, where she taught Australian history from 1990 to 2021. She was formerly the Bicentennial Professor of Australian History (2013-21) and the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University (2016-17). She has been a president of the History Council of NSW, a co-editor of the journal History Australia and a judge of the NSW Premier’s History Awards. Her many publications on the history of gender, family and status include the award-winning Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia, which was shortlisted for the PM’s Prize for Australian History in 2011.
Professor Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at The University of Western Australia. She is interested in the ways that popular and especially visual culture have shaped ideas and debates about race, identity and culture that persist today. In particular, Jane is concerned with the history of Australia’s engagement with anti-slavery, humanitarianism, and ultimately human rights. Her recent books include The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights, which won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ USQ History Book Award, and Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire.
Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She is the author of four works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom, which comprise the first two instalments of her Democracy Trilogy. Clare has written and presented history documentaries for ABC TV and hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever. In 2020, Clare was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for “services to literature and to historical research”. In 2022, Clare was on the National Cultural Policy Expert Advisory Panel and was commissioned to co-write (with Christos Tsiolkis) the Vision Statement for the policy document, Revive. She is a Member of the National Museum of Australia Council.
Michael Aird is Director of the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum. While not holding an academic position for most of his career, his research output is significant, being recognized internationally, particularly for the study of photographs of Indigenous people. He has worked in the area of Aboriginal arts and cultural heritage and since 1985 maintaining an interest in documenting aspects of urban Aboriginal history and culture. He has curated over 30 exhibitions and undertaken numerous research projects in the area of native title, local histories and art. In 1996 he established Keeaira Press an independent publishing house, producing over 35 books, he has also contributed to academic journals and numerous other publications.
Poetry
Andy Jackson is a poet preoccupied with disability, community, otherness and solidarity. He was awarded the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellowship, and is a Writers Victoria Patron. Andy has featured at literary events and arts festivals across Australia, including Melbourne Writers Festival, Castlemaine State Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, and on ABC’s Radio National and the 7.30 Report. His collections have been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. He has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Andy lives and works on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country, and is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne.
Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist based on Gadigal land, Sydney. Her practice is centred around poetics while producing works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print.
Their writing has been widely published nationally and internationally, and performed on stages around the world, including: TEDx Sydney, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Sydney Opera House, Literature Live! Mumbai, Performance Space New York, PEN International, and a wide range of arts and literary festivals in every Australian state and territory.
Jazz’s first poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) was the 2020 winner of the David Unaipon Award and a second collection is forthcoming through UQP in 2024. Their first feature film WINHANGANHA, commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive, will premiere in October 2023.
Judith Beveridge has won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the New South Wales, Queensland and Victorian Premiers’ Awards. She is a highly regarded critic, editor and teacher of poetry. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005 to 2015, and co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry, 1985-2015. She lives in Sydney.
Fiction

WINNER: 'Cold Enough For Snow', Jessica Au

'The Sun Walks Down', Fiona McFarlane

'Losing Face', George Haddad

'Other Houses', Paddy O’Reilly

'The Lovers', Yumna Kassab
Children's literature

WINNER: 'Open Your Heart to Country', Jasmine Seymour

'The Dunggiirr Brother and the Caring Song of the Whale,' Aunty Shaa Smith

'Zadie Ma and the Dog Who Chased the Moon,' Gabrielle Wang

'11 Words for Love,' Randa Abdel-Fattah, Maxine Beneba Clarke

'My Strange, Shrinking Parents,' Zeno Sworder
Young adult literature

WINNER: 'The Greatest Thing,' Sarah Winifred Searle

'Sugar,' Carly Nugent

'Ask No Questions', Eva Collins

'The Upwelling', Lystra Rose

'What We All Saw,' Mike Lucas
Non-fiction

WINNER: 'My Father and Other Animals: How I Took on the Family Farm', Sam Vincent

'Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life', Brigitta Olubus

'We Come With This Place', Debra Dank

'Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong', Louisa Lim

A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions Thom van Dooren
Australian history

'Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station,' Shannyn Palmer

'Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm', Alan Atkinson

'Justice in Kelly Country: The Story of the Cop Who Hunted Australia’s Most Notorious Bushrangers', Lachlan Strahan

'Saving the Reef: The human story behind one of Australia’s greatest environmental treasures', Rohan Lloyd

'Black Lives, White Law: Locked Up & Locked Out in Australia,' Russell Marks
Poetry

WINNER: 'At the Altar of Touch,' Gavin Yuan Gao

'Harvest Lingo', Lionel Fogarty

'Exactly As I Am', Rae White

'The Jaguar', Sarah Holland-Batt

'Clean', Scott-Patrick Mitchell