Kibble and Dobbie Awards 2018 winners announced

The winners of the 2018 Kibble and Dobbie Literary Awards were announced at a ceremony at the State Library of New South Wales on 25 July.

The $30,000 Nita B Kibble Literary Award, which recognises the work of an established Australian woman writer, was presented to Fiona McFarlane for her collection of 14 stories The High Places (Hamish Hamilton).

The High Places was chosen from a shortlist of four that also included Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race (Hachette), Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (A&U) and Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look (Text).

The $5000 Dobbie Award for a first published work by an Australian woman writer went to Sarah Krasnostein for her biography The Trauma Cleaner (Text).

The Trauma Cleaner was chosen from a shortlist of three that also included Madelaine Dickie’s Troppo (Fremantle Press) and Micheline Lee’s The Healing Party: A Novel (Black Inc.).

Speaking on behalf of the judging panel, Humanities Australia editor Elizabeth Webby said that this year’s winning works are ‘especially notable for their originality and literary excellence’.

The Kibble and Dobbie Literary Awards were established by Nita Dobbie to honour her aunt Nita Kibble, the first female librarian at the State Library of New South Wales. The biennial awards are open to women writers with published works of fiction or nonfiction classified as ‘life writing’.

In 2016, the Kibble Literary Award was presented to Fiona Wright for Small of Acts of Disappearance (Giramondo) and the Dobbie award was presented to Lucy Treloar for Salt Creek (Picador).

For more information about the awards, click here.

Category: Awards Local news