Wright wins second Stella; NSW, WA premiers’ lit awards shortlists; Hachette on Best Places to Work list
Last Thursday Alexis Wright became the first author to win the Stella Prize twice, with her fourth novel, Praiseworthy (Giramondo), named the winner of the $60,000 award in a ceremony in Melbourne. In what was a big week for awards news, shortlists for the WA Premier’s Book Awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were also revealed.
In other awards news, Aotearoa New Zealand writer Tracey Slaughter has won the 2024 ABR Calibre Essay Prize for the essay ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’; the shortlist for the 2024 ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript has been announced; and the longlist for the Book Links 2024 Award for Children’s Historical Fiction has also been announced.
In other local news, Red Room Poetry will present the UK poetry and spoken word festival Contains Strong Language at venues across Gadigal and Dharug lands in Sydney in late August; Hachette Australia has been included for the second year running in the Best Places to Work list published annually by the Australian Financial Review and BOSS magazine; Fremantle Press’s early reading program, Bookaburras, will launch a regional tour featuring Bookaburras Ambassadors across Western Australia; and, in Aotearoa New Zealand, PANZ has announced the first guests for its international conference, to be held in Auckland on 1 and 2 August, as well as the appointment of Courtney Sina Meredith as its new association director.
Overseas, the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been announced in the UK, while in the US, the American Booksellers Association is seeking to add independent bookstores to the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, and Simon & Schuster has announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Netherlands publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning.
Category: This week’s news
