Wilson wins inaugural UWAP Dorothy Hewett award

Josephine Wilson has won UWA Publishing’s inaugural Dorothy Hewett award for an unpublished manuscript for her novel ‘Extinctions’.

Wilson wins $10,000 and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing. Wilson’s manuscript was chosen from a shortlist of nine and from 130 entries to the prize.

The judges, UWAP director Terri-ann White, author David Carlin and poet and niece of Dorothy Hewett Lucy Dougan, said Wilson’s novel has ‘a strong, complex sense of Perth’ and is ‘funny throughout in a wry, as well as an absurd, laugh-out-loud way’. ‘It was the strongest entry and one that continued to occupy the minds of each reader,’ the judges said.

UWAP published Wilson’s debut novel Cusp in 2005.

The inaugural award was open to manuscripts of fiction, narrative nonfiction and poetry ‘inclusive of hybrid genres’ with a connection to Western Australia through ‘landscape, people, history, the residence or birthplace of the author, and so on’. The award was created in partnership with the Copyright Agency and 720 ABC Perth.

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Category: Local news