UWA Publishing, with the support of the Copyright Agency, has announced the entries that have been shortlisted for the 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award.
The shortlist of unpublished manuscripts include: Clutch Feathers, Draw Breath by Corrie Hosking; Perpetual Stew by Georgie Harriss; The Hair of the Pigeon by Mohammed Massoud Morsi; Laughing River by N J Madden; you are HERE by Roderick Poole; and Bad Westerns by Tim Loveday.
The judges for the 2025 award are Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, UWA Chair of Australian Literature, Kate Pickard, UWAP publishing manager, James Jiang, Sydney Review of Books editor, and WA poet Caitlin Maling.
This year, the shortlist was chosen from more than 300 entries and the judges commented that the shortlisted titles stood out for the sharpness of their vision and creative amplitude.
Work of fiction, Clutch Feathers, Draw Breath, is fretted with fine illustrations and explores human fragility, fragmentation and the therapeutic dimensions of art.
Perpetual Stew is a coming-of-age story that follows the interior life and misadventures of 19-year-old Georgie as they come to terms with their sexual self.
The Hair of the Pigeon speaks to the moment we are in and follows childhood friends in the tangled streets of millennial Damascus as they grow into adulthood.
Captivating road novel Laughing River is set during what appears to be the Victorian gold rush and chronicles the hardening of a young boy into an inveterate survivalist, as he drifts from one locale to the next, changing names and companions along the way.
A virtuosic novel from the eyes of Roo – a resident of Northcote Town – in a future climate and disease ravaged version of the suburbs of Melbourne, you are HERE is unlike any novel in contemporary Australian literature.
Singing with the many vocabularies of masculinity in rural Australia, Bad Westerns is a deceptively rough book of poetry and a skilled lyric exploration of the interplay of violence and tenderness.
The award is named after Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002) whose work challenged the norms of 20th century Australian culture.
The award is open to Australian writers of fiction, narrative non-fiction and poetry and the winner will receive $10,000, courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, and a publishing contract with UWA Publishing. The winner will be announced in July 2025.