Wright, Tiffany 2024 Melbourne Prize winners

Alexis Wright has won the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature, and Carrie Tiffany has won the $10,000 Writers Prize.

A member of the Waanyi Nation of the Southern Highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Wright won the Melbourne Prize for Literature for her body of published work—which includes four novels and several works of nonfiction—and ‘an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life’.

Tiffany won the $10,000 Writers Prize for the essay ‘Seven snakes,’ which judges selected as the winner for its ‘outstanding originality, literary merit and creative freshness’. The essay will be published in Meanjin 83.4 Summer 2024.

Angus Cerini and Claire Thomas have won the inaugural 2024 Falls Creek Writers Residencies, with each awarded a cash prize of $1000 and a three-week residency at Falls Creek Alpine Resort.

Judith Bishop has won the $1500 Civic Choice Award, a prize awarded to a finalist of the Writers Prize.

All non-winning finalists will be awarded $1000.

Prize judges, Evelyn Araluen, Christos Tsiolkas and Michael Williams, said: ‘For twenty years now the annual Melbourne Prize has captured the scope and ambition of writerly achievement in this City of Literature. For the judges, assessing The Writers Prize and the Melbourne Prize for Literature side by side gives an opportunity to consider vital and urgent new writing in essay form, and then also the question of a lasting contribution and bodies of work by our literary greats. The field was very strong, and beyond the excellent shortlists, the range of entries were a pleasure to read and a reminder of the breadth and strength of writers working in this country today.’

The judges added: ‘There was real commitment to intellectual rigour and curiosity in the best essays, as well as a fearlessness and a desire to be creatively daring. It was wonderful to read such an invigorating collection. Equally, the impressive range of applications for the Melbourne Prize for Literature speaks to both the outstanding writers we have in this country and the integrity and reputation of the annual Melbourne Prize itself. For the three of us, it was an honour and a (sometimes daunting) pleasure to be part of this judging panel.’

The Melbourne Prize for Literature is awarded every three years to a Victorian author whose body of published work ‘has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life’.

Tsiolkas won the last Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2021, while Araluen won a $20,000 Professional Development Award, and Eloise Grills won the 2021 Writer’s Prize.

More information about the awards is available on the prize website.

Pictured left: Alexis Wright, credit Darren James. Pictured right: Carrie Tiffany, credit Celeste de Clario.

Category: Awards Local news