Lucashenko wins Nib; APA, ASA, Copyright Agency welcome AI recommendations; McGuire wins Richell Prize
The Federal Government’s Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence has released its final report, with recommendations on consultation, fair remuneration and transparency among those welcomed by Copyright Agency, the Australian Society of Authors, and the Australian Publishers Association, and Wen Yee Ang has been appointed the inaugural Hachette x Media Diversity Australia (MDA) Trainee—a two-year, full-time position announced by the organisations in August.
In awards news, Melissa Lucashenko won the Waverley Council’s 2024 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award for the novel Edenglassie (UQP); Alexis Wright won the 2024 Voss Literary Prize for Praiseworthy (Giramondo); Eva Phillips won the 2024 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for the manuscript ‘Borrow-or-rob’; Myles McGuire won the 2024 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers for the manuscript Stroke; Ju Bavyka won the 2025 Peter Blazey Fellowship; and Alice Pung is the winner of the 2024 Alice Award. And in France, Anna Funder was named the winner of the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in the nonfiction category for the French translation of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Hamish Hamilton). Meanwhile, the winners of the 2024 Comic Arts Awards of Australia were also announced this week; along with the shortlists for the 2024 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship; the inaugural Australian Fiction Prize; and the Ampersand Prize.
In local acquisitions, Allen & Unwin acquired ANZ rights to History’s Strangest Deaths by Riley Knight; HarperCollins acquired ANZ rights to Sam Guthrie’s debut novel, The Compromised; Transit Lounge acquired world rights to Brendan Colley’s second novel, The Season for Flying Saucers; UWA Publishing acquired ANZ rights to children’s series The Cockatoo Crew by Lora Inak, in a four-book deal; and Affirm acquired world rights to self-help book The Introvert’s Guide to Leaving the House by Jenny Valentish.
Over in the UK, the winners of the 2024 Polari Prizes have been announced; and the Bookseller reported that Spines, a startup technology company founded in 2021 that published its first titles this year, is ‘offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books’. This follows news from Publishers Weekly that, of about 320 start-ups launched in the publishing industry in the past two years, ‘nearly all’ are AI-related, according to contributor and consultant Thad McIlroy.
Category: This week’s news
