Kibble and Dobbie Awards 2018 shortlists announced
The shortlists for the 2018 Kibble and Dobbie Awards have been announced.
The four shortlisted titles for the $30,000 Kibble Literary Award for an established Australian female author are:
- The Hate Race (Maxine Beneba Clarke, Hachette)
- The Life to Come (Michelle de Kretser, A&U)
- Everywhere I Look (Helen Garner, Text)
- The High Places (Fiona McFarlane, Hamish Hamilton).
The three shortlisted titles for the $5000 Dobbie Literary Award for a first-time published Australian female author are:
- Troppo (Madelaine Dickie, Fremantle Press)
- The Trauma Cleaner (Sarah Krasnostein, Text)
- The Healing Party: A Novel (Micheline Lee, Black Inc.).
The shortlists were chosen from longlists announced in April. The awards moved to a biennial format in 2016, making the 2018 awards open to any work published in the last two years.
The judging panel for this year’s awards comprises literary critic Elizabeth Webby, State Library of New South Wales coordinator Rachel Franks, and author Eleanor Limprecht.
Webby said that this year’s shortlists ‘demonstrate the wide range as well as the continuing high quality of life writing by Australian women’. ‘The four titles shortlisted for the Kibble Award come from well established as well as newer female authors. Most of them deal with life in contemporary Australia but each author has a very individual voice and uses a different literary genre.’
The winners will be announced at an event in Sydney on 25 July.
The Kibble and Dobbie Literary Awards are open to Australian female writers who have published a book of fiction or nonfiction classifiable as ‘life writing’. The most recent winners were Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance (Giramondo), which won the 2016 Kibble Award, and Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek (Picador), which was awarded the 2016 Dobbie.
Find more information about the awards here.
Category: Awards Local news
