Ortiz wins 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award

Kaya Ortiz has won the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award for their unpublished manuscript, Past and Parallel Lives.

Ortiz receives a publishing contract and manuscript development with UWA Publishing, and $10,000 prize money courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

A queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and record-keeper of ancient histories, Ortiz hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and lutruwita/Tasmania and is obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time. Their writing has appeared in Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, The Best of Australian Poems 2021 and After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020), among others. Ortiz lives and writes on unceded Whadjuck Noongar country.

Judges Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Astrid Edwards, Thuy On and Kate Pickard said Past and Parallel Lives is ‘a poetic offering that thrums in liminal space. It’s about the migratory experience, the queer body, the unfixed, confused identity carving a space in the world. It’s about borrowed languages, (un)belonging, and attempts of navigating treacherous cultural and racial expectations with courage and grace.’

First awarded in 2017, the Dorothy Hewett Award is open to Australian writers across the categories of fiction, narrative nonfiction and poetry.

The 2023 winner of the award was Kirsty Iltners for Depth of Field.

Category: Awards Local news