Ritchie wins 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award

Brendan Ritchie has won the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for his novel Eta Draconis.

Ritchie, an academic and early-career novelist from the south coast of WA, receives a publishing contract and manuscript development with UWA Publishing (UWAP). The judging panel for the 2022 Award was Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Leni Shilton, Astrid Edwards and Eleanor Hurt, who described Eta Draconis as ‘a poetic and compelling novel for the Covid moment’.

Chosen from a shortlist of six, Eta Draconis is a road novel set in a world besieged by a long and destructive meteor shower. The story follows two sisters as they journey from their small coastal town to the city ahead of the coming university semester. The relationship between the sisters is fractured and fading, turned upside down by the meteorites that arrived at the start of their adolescence and the strange world they have inhabited since. As the showering intensifies and their way forward becomes threatened, the sisters are forced to confront their problems and recalibrate their hopes for the future.

‘This manuscript was born out of my own road trips between home and university,’ said Ritchie. ‘Eight hours of silent, shifting landscape to ponder my place within the world as it finally began to open up in front of me. And out of an endless fascination with the universe—creation and destruction resting so vividly above.’

The judges said of Ritchie’s winning novel: ‘Life on earth undergoes a complex change as meteorites begin to rain down from the dying star Eta Draconis. The world does not collapse, but old certainties disappear and a new mood falls over human societies.’

Ritchie, who was awarded a PhD in creative writing in 2015, published his debut novel Carousel that same year. The sequel, Beyond Carousel (both Fremantle Press), was released in 2016, while Ritchie has also published poetry and nonfiction in several notable journals and collections.

Joshua Kemp’s Banjawarn (submitted as ‘Strangest Places’), released in February 2022, and Kgshak Akec’s Hopeless Kingdom, released in August 2022, were the joint winners of last year’s award. Previous winners include Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls and the inaugural winner, Extinctions by Josephine Wilson, which went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Eta Draconis will be released in 2023. For more information about the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, see the UWAP website.

Category: Awards Local news