Morton wins 2025 UQP Quentin Bryce Award

UQP has announced Rachel Morton as the winner of the 2025 UQP Quentin Bryce Award, worth $5000, for her novel The Sun Was Electric Light.

The award, which recognises The Honourable Dame Quentin Bryce, is for a book on UQP’s list each year that celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality.

Of selecting The Sun Was Electric Light from UQP’s 2025 list, Dame Quentin Bryce said: ‘What a special book this is. Tender, poignant and filled with longing for those people and places we’ve lost – and perhaps never truly found in the first place. Rachel Morton’s novel leads us through the ache of grief, for self and others, towards acceptance. It was just the book I needed to sustain me this year and I believe other readers will agree.’

Morton is a writer living on Eastern Maar/Gunditjmara Country in south-west Victoria. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry. The Sun Was Electric Light is her first novel and won the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. She said, ‘I am very honoured to be receiving this award. I didn’t think my book would even be published; to be recognised in this way is a surprise and a delight. I am grateful to Quentin Bryce for seeing something in my work, and I am also grateful to her for her life of service, which is an inspiration to women everywhere.’

The UQP Quentin Bryce Award was established in 2020. The 2024 winner was Jazz Money for mark the dawn.

Category: Awards Local news