Skovron wins 2023 Patrick White Award
Victoria-based author Alex Skovron is the winner of this year’s $20,000 Patrick White Award.
The award recognises Skovron’s achievements as a poet and fiction writer. Born in Poland, Skovron lived briefly in Israel, and migrated to Australia in 1958. His writing has earned him several major awards, including the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the John Shaw Neilson Award, the ABR (now Peter Porter) Prize, and for his first book The Rearrangement (1988), the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His collection Towards the Equator (2014) was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, while his novella The Poet (2005) was a joint winner of the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award for fiction. Skovron’s work has been translated into many other languages, such as Czech, French and Dutch.
On winning the award, Skovron said: ‘This wonderful surprise has come at something of a milestone moment in my life, on the heels of my 75th birthday, and to receive the award means a great deal to me—both as a recognition of my work to date, and as further encouragement towards what I still hope to achieve. Above all, I feel honoured to be joining such an impressive cohort of past winners, many of whose stories and poems I’ve read and admired over many years. My thanks to the judges, to Perpetual Limited—and of course to Patrick White.’
Patrick White established the annual literary award—using the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature—to advance Australian literature ‘by encouraging the writing of novels, short stories, poetry and plays for publication or performance’. The award is presented by Perpetual to authors who have ‘made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition’. This year’s judging panel was chaired by Felicity Plunkett and included Julieanne Lamond and Michelle de Kretser.
Skovron will be honoured for his contribution to Australian literature at the Patrick White Literary Award celebration at Readings State Library Victoria at 6pm on 15 November.
The winner of last year’s Patrick White Award was author Antigone Kefala.
Category: Awards Local news
