Iltners wins 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award

Kirsty Iltners has won the 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her entry Depth of Field.

Iltners, a writer and freelance photographer living in Brisbane, receives a publishing contract and manuscript development with UWA Publishing, and $10,000 prize money courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Depth of Field follows two very different but unknowingly linked characters, both dealing with their own past trauma. It examines how our past impacts our choices and the concept of judgement and perception—how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.

The judges said: ‘With its casually clipped first-person narration, and alternating narrative perspectives, Depth of Field asks questions about the reliability of memory and the conditions of representation.’ ‘Shutter-speed, aspect ratio, apertures, depth of field, the metrics of light—the mechanisms of photography are allowed to falter just enough to expose the fragility of the images and moments that make up life,’ the judges said.

Brendan Ritchie’s Eta Draconis was the winner of last year’s award. Previous winners include Josh Kemp’s Banjawarn, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction and is currently shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer, Kgshak Akec’s Hopeless Kingdom, which has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the inaugural winner, Extinctions by Josephine Wilson, which went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Depth of Field will be published in 2024. For more information about the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, see the UWAP website.

Category: Awards Local news