City of Fremantle Hungerford Award 2024 winner announced
Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes has won the 2024 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award for his manuscript የተስፋ ፈተና / Trials of Hope. The author receives $15,000 in prize money, a publishing contract with Fremantle Press and a residency fellowship with the Centre for Stories.
Written in English and Amharic poetry and prose, the autobiographic work shares the author’s journey from boy shepherd in Ethiopia to human rights academic at Curtin University.
Woldeyes is a writer, researcher and poet from Lalibela, Ethiopia, who now lives with his wife, writer Rebecca Higgie, in the Perth suburb of Bentley. He said the manuscript’s English narrative was written over two years but the work’s Amharic poems were written across decades, using Ethiopia’s indigenous script (Ge’ez Fidel). Woldeyes said: ‘I love crossing multiple worlds and languages with a heart that bleeds with despair, and rejoices with love. Hope is a poetic force that carries me across these boundaries.’
‘The thrill that comes with writing in my native language is immense,’ said Woldeyes. ‘The Hungerford Award means an opening of hope, a realisation that stories and languages like mine could have places in a world where they are rarely heard. People who live carrying multiple worlds shouldn’t have to hide or sacrifice one world to exist in the other world. This too is our home; our stories can be heard.’
The City of Fremantle Hungerford Award is presented biennially to a full-length unpublished manuscript of fiction or narrative nonfiction by a Western Australian author whose work has not previously been published in book form.
Judges selected the winner from a shortlist of four titles announced in September, which had been chosen from more than 80 entries. This year’s judges were Seth Malacari, Marcella Polain and Richard Rossiter, alongside Fremantle Press publishers Georgia Richter and Cate Sutherland.
Fremantle Press CEO Alex Allan said: ‘Yirga’s story is extraordinary. It is a love song to his homeland that will inspire other Western Australians with a story to share.’
Announcing the winner, City of Fremantle mayor Hannah Fitzhardinge said: ‘The city is proud to welcome another passionate and gifted writer into the Hungerford Award alumni and its thirty-three-year heritage of identifying talented new storytellers. We love to provide emerging artists access to initiatives like this award, which incubates, supports and grows their creative output.’
Molly Schmidt won the 2022 award for her manuscript Salt River Road, which Fremantle Press published in August 2023.
More information about the award is available on the Fremantle Press website.
Pictured L–R: Alex Allan, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes and Hannah Fitzhardinge.
Category: Awards Local news
