VPLAs 2023 shortlists announced

The shortlists for the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were announced in December.

The shortlisted and highly commended works in each category are:

Fiction ($25,000)

• An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life (Paul Dalla Rosa, A&U)
• Cold Enough for Snow (Jessica Au, Giramondo)
• Salonika Burning (Gail Jones, Text)
• The Lovers (Yumna Kassab, Ultimo)
• The Signal Line (Brendan Colley, Transit Lounge)
• This Devastating Fever (Sophie Cunningham, Ultimo)

Highly commended

• All That’s Left Unsaid (Tracey Lien, HQ Fiction)
• Limberlost (Robbie Arnott, Text)
• Loveland (Robert Lukins, A&U)

Nonfiction ($25,000)

• Childhood: A memoir (Shannon Burns, Text)
• Indelible City: Dispossession and defiance in Hong Kong (Louisa Lim, Text)
• Our Members Be Unlimited (Sam Wallman, Scribe)
• People Who Lunch: Essays on work, leisure and loose living (Sally Olds, Upswell)
• Root & Branch: Essays on inheritance (Eda Gunaydin, NewSouth)
• The Uncaged Sky: My 804 days in an Iranian prison(Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Ultimo)

Highly commended

• Bedtime Story (Chloe Hooper, Scribner)
• Big Beautiful Female Theory (Eloise Grills, Affirm Press)
• Hard Labour: Wage theft in the age of inequality (Ben Schneiders, Scribe)

Drama ($25,000)

• Golden Blood 黄金血液 (Merlynn Tong, Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company)
• The Return (John Harvey, Malthouse Theatre)
• Whitefella Yella Tree (Dylan Van Den Berg, Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company)

Highly commended

• An Indigenous Trilogy – Act I: Three magpies perched in a tree (Glenn Shea, The Storyteller)
• Orange Thrower (Kirsty Marillier, Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company)

Poetry ($25,000)

• At the Altar of Touch (Gavin Yuan Gao, UQP)
• Clean (Scott-Patrick Mitchell, Upswell)
• Fugitive (Simon Tedeschi, Upswell)

Highly commended

• Harvest Lingo (Lionel Fogarty, Giramondo)
• Song of Less (Joan Flemming, Cordite)

Young adult ($25,000)

• The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness (Matt Ottley (Dirt Lane Press/WestWords)
• We Who Hunt the Hollow (Kate Murray, HGCP)
• Where You Left Us (Rhiannon Wilde, UQP)

Highly commended

• My Spare Heart (Jared Thomas, A&U)
• Sugar (Carly Nugent, Text)

Indigenous writing ($25,000)

• Astronomy (Karlie Noon & Krystal De Napoli, T&H)
• Harvest Lingo (Lionel Fogarty, Giramondo)
• Tell Me Again (Amy Thunig, UQP)
• The Upwelling (Lystra Rose, Hachette)

Highly commended

• Cartwarra or what? (Alf Taylor, Magabala)
• Masked Histories: Turtle shell masks and Torres Strait Islander People (Leah Liu-Chivizhe, MUP)

Unpublished Manuscript ($15,000)

• ‘Bright Objects’ by Ruby Todd
• ‘One Divine Night’ by Mick Cummins
• ‘Stillwater’ by Amy Brown.

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in Melbourne on Thursday, 2 February 2023, at which the winner of the $2000 people’s choice award will also be announced. The winners of the fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, young adult and Indigenous writing awards are all in the running for the overall Victorian Prize for Literature, worth an additional $100,000.

The 2022 Victorian Prize for Literature was awarded to Veronica Gorrie for her debut memoir Black and Blue: A memoir of racism and resilience (Scribe).

For more information, see the Wheeler Centre website.

Category: Awards Local news News