ABIA, ABDA winners announced; Kinokuniya awaits ‘Gender Queer’ classification outcome; black&write! 2023 fellowships

The winners of the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) have been announced, with RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Nagi Maehashi, Macmillan) winning book of the year. The Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA) has announced the winners of the 2023 Australian Book Design Awards, as well as the establishment of the ‘Baseline’ Book Design Internship.

Hachette Australia has released a Commitment to Professional Behaviour in Publishing, adapted from the British version established by industry groups the Association of Authors’ Agents, the Booksellers Association, the Publishers Association and the Society of Authors, and Sydney bookshop Kinokuniya, which paid for the Australian Classification Board to determine the classification of the graphic novel Gender Queer: A memoir (Maia Kobabe, Oni Press), is awaiting the board’s subsequent response to an appeal against its decision that the title should be available Unrestricted.

The 2023 black&write! fellowships for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers have been awarded to Dakota Feirer and Jacob K Gallagher; Rafeif Ismail and Emily Stewart are among the seven recipients of the 2023 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships, each worth $50,000; Jumaana Abdu has been recieved the $15,000 Dal Stivens Literary Award and Dylin Hardcastle has been awarded the $15,000 Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award; and Katherine Allum has won the 2023 Fogarty Literary Award for her novel The Skeleton House. Also in awards news, the shortlist for the 2023 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal has been announced.

In the UK, coffee chain Caffè Nero has launched new book awards, worth a total of £50,000 (A$94,500), a year after Costa Coffee announced the end of the Costa Book Awards; None of the Above (Travis Alabanza, Canongate) and When Our Worlds Collided (Danielle Jawando, S&S Children’s) are the winners of the 2022 Jhalak prizes, which recognise ‘authors who feel that their work is often marginalised unless it fulfils a romantic fetishisation of their cultural heritage’; and German author Katja Oskamp has won the 2023 Dublin Literary Award for Marzahn, Mon Amour (trans by Jo Heinrich, Peirene Press).

Category: This week’s news