Australian Centre Literary Awards 2019 winners announced

The winners of the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre Literary Awards have been announced.

Ellen van Neerven won the $15,000 Peter Blazey Fellowship, named in memory of journalist, author and gay activist Peter Blazey, and awarded to further a work in progress in biography, autobiography or life writing. Van Neerven’s piece ‘Personal Score’ ‘juxtaposes an evocatively alternative sports narrative—about a gender diverse character’s experiences at a women’s football club—with a meditation on Indigenous connections to land and place’.

Oliver Reeson’s ‘Body Potential’ was highly commended for the fellowship.

Kevin Brophy won the $4000 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, presented to an author or composer of original verse or poetry, for Look at the Lake (Puncher & Wattman). The judges said Brophy’s ‘attentiveness to tiny details, to the intertwining of place and person and politics, enable the poet to become a medium without voyeurism, committed to the unobtrusive and sensitive labour of recording and transmission’.

Three works were highly commended for the prize: Yuiquimbiang (Louise Crisp, Cordite), Conspiracy of Skin (Peter Mitchell, Picaro) and Blakwork (Alison Whittaker, Magabala).

Irish poet Susan Dickey won the biennial Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, which funds travel from Ireland to Melbourne, for genuine human values­ (Lifeboat Press)—a collection of verse drama and prose poems that are an ‘animated anti-heroic rewriting of Marlowe’s mini-epic Hero and Leander’.

Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin) was highly commended for the prize.

The awards were announced during an event at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

For more information about the prizes, visit the website.

(Pictured: Ellen van Neerven)

Category: Awards Local news