Treloar wins Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award

Friday, 8 March 2013 Books+Publishing

Lucy Treloar has won this year’s Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her manuscript The Things We Tell Ourselves.

Treloar’s manuscript was selected from a shortlist of three for the award, which was announced during Adelaide Writers’ Week on 7 March. The other manuscripts shortlisted for the award were The Great Divide by Rex Hunter and In Camera Obscura by Chrissy Collins.

Treloar will receive a cash prize of $10,000 as well as a mentorship worth $2000 to help develop the manuscript. This year’s mentor is yet to be announced.

The South Australian Writers’ Centre, which manages the award on behalf of Writing Australia, said in a statement that Treloar’s manuscript is an ‘evocative and accomplished novel’ which ‘examines recent Cambodian history and its legacies, [and] in particular, the role of expatriates and aid agencies in that country’. ‘While telling an engaging story of one young woman’s experiences, the novel explores cultural differences and raises questions about belonging and responsibility and what drives us to help others and the extent to which we can,’ said the centre.

This year’s award was judged by associate publisher of fiction at Scribe Aviva Tuffield and authors J M Coetzee and Toni Jordan. Tuffield said she was ‘most impressed by how many of the longlisted entries grappled with important contemporary political issues’. ‘The entries revealed that many writers are engaged with, and attempting to use fiction as a way to portray, the pressing issues of our times, especially immigration and asylum seekers, and questions of national and personal identity,’ said Tuffield.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, Hannah Kent won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award at the end of 2011 for her novel Burial Rites. Kent’s novel, which will be published by Picador in May, was the subject of a bidding war between major publishers in 2012.

For more information about Writing Australia, click here.

Category: Local news