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Tuesday, 28 July 2015

UWA Publishing, in partnership with Copyright Agency Limited and ABC 720 Perth, has established a new award for an unpublished manuscript in Western Australia, a state that has produced some of the nation’s finest writers and thinkers.

The aim of the Dorothy Hewett Award is to support literary talent both in and related to Western Australia, and to celebrate the life and writing of a stalwart Australian radical. The award will be an annual fixture designed to be a catalyst for writers beginning or furthering their professional writing careers.

Hewett (1923-2002) is considered one of Australia’s leading writers whose work captures and disrupts ideas of normalcy in twentieth century Australian culture. As a staunch feminist and, for a long time, communist, Hewett gave voice to the marginalised.

In 1986 Dorothy Hewett was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to literature. Hewett won the Western Australian Premier’s Poetry Award in 1994 and 1995 for her collections Peninsula and Collected Poems: 1940-1995 .

The Dorothy Hewett Award is open to all writers who have completed a manuscript and are seeking publication. The work must be fiction, narrative non-fiction or poetry, inclusive of hybrid genres such as verse novels or memoirs.

The winner will receive a cash prize of $10,000, courtesy of Copyright Agency Limited, and will be offered a publishing contract by UWA Publishing. The award will be announced at a special event at the Perth Writers Festival 2016.

The inaugural prize will be judged by UWA Publishing Director Terri-ann White; poet and neice of Dorothy Hewett Dr Lucy Dougan; and author and RMIT academic David Carlin.

Applications open on 1 August 2015 and close on 4 September. The shortlist will be released on 11 December 2015 and the winner announced during the Perth Writers Festival, 18-21 February 2016.

Media references

David Stacey (UWA Media and Public Relations Manager)      (+61 8) 6488 3229 / (+61 4) 32 637 716

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