Abdu awarded Dal Stivens award, Hardcastle awarded Kathleen Mitchell award
Jumaana Abdu has been awarded the $15,000 Dal Stivens Literary Award, presented biennially to an author aged 30 or under for the best literary short story or essay, for her short fiction piece The Long Supper, which ‘explores the myriad consumptions of woman, as well as the inviolable refuge of her soul’.
A junior medical doctor at a hospital in Southwestern Sydney, Abdu is a current Wheeler Centre Next Chapter fellow, and completed a writer’s residency at Varuna Writers’ House. She is working on her debut novel, which was a finalist for the 2022 Ray Koppe/ASA Young Writer’s Fellowship. Abdu’s work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, the Griffith Review, Overland, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Her interests lie in transposing the sensibilities of Islamic art into English literature, ‘the psychic reverberations of amnesia and lost inheritance of people in diaspora (particularly from North Africa and Palestine), and the reductiveness of having to define one’s identity or translate one’s inner realm’.
The Dal Stivens Award, named after Australian writer Dal Stivens, was established in 2007 in the will of Juanita Cragen, to whom Stivens left his literary estate. Stivens was founding president of the Australian Society of Authors in 1963.
Dylin Hardcastle has been awarded the $15,000 Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award, presented biennially to the author aged 30 or under for an outstanding novel or novella, for their forthcoming novel A Language of Limbs (A&U).
Hardcastle is a trans author, artist and screenwriter whose most recent novel, Below Deck (A&U) has been published in 10 territories and translated into eight languages. Their previous novel for young adults, Breathing Under Water (Hachette), was longlisted for national book awards and their memoir, Running Like China (Hachette), which they wrote at 19, was editor’s pick in the Sydney Morning Herald the week of its publication.
A Language of Limbs has been optioned for TV adaptation and is in development, with the book due to be published by A&U in 2024.
The Katheleen Mitchell Award was established by Mitchell in 1996 to support young authors and encourage the ‘advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature’.
The Dal Stivens Award and Kathleen Mitchell Award are administered by the Australia Council.
In other news from the Australia Council, the organisation also celebrated Australia Council Fellowship recipient Leah Purcell at the announcement of the 2023 First Nations Arts and Culture Awards. The actor, writer and director is the author of The Drover’s Wife (Penguin), a novel adaptation of her play of the same name, which reimagines Henry Lawson’s short story.
For more information about the First Nations Arts and Culture Awards see the Australia Council website here.
Pictured (L–R): Jumaana Abdu and Dylin Hardcastle
Category: Awards Local news
