A tale of two sisters who experience a painful but often beautiful awakening and the story of an Australian artist in Florence who asks what remains when memory and language begin to fail have been named joint winners of the 2026 Dorothy Hewett Award.
UWA Publishing announced Chris Brophy for Snow and Kimberley Starr for being made of stone as the two winners of the unpublished manuscript award.
Image: Chris Brophy and Kimberley Starr.
The judges were Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, The University of Western Australia’s Chair of Australian Literature; Linda Martin, co-publisher of Night Parrot Press; Samuel Bernard, a literary agent at Zeitgeist Agency; and Kate Pickard, publisher of UWA Publishing.
The judges said Brophy’s Snow took them back to the Australia of the early 1960s, experienced through the eyes of a young girl and her sister.
“With their mother in a psychiatric hospital and father away for long periods at sea, they grow up in the home of their relatives in a small country town,” they said.
“Following a path laid down by ageing photographs, the novel takes us through a painful but often beautiful awakening.”
The judges said Starr’s being made of stone opened with a scene of confusion and desperation.
“A mother has lost her daughter in a crowded art museum in a foreign country, but all is not as it seems,” they said.
“This lost child is the cipher of a deeper loss in the coherence of the world. While a motif of sculpture runs through the novel, the figures of stone cannot quite maintain the permanence they promise.”
Ms Brophy, who has worked as a teacher, librarian, arts administrator and cultural heritage researcher, said she was over the moon when she received news of her shortlisting but never expected to win.
“The Dorothy Hewett Award offers a rare opportunity for a newcomer like me, an older, debut novelist, to be published,” she said.
“I am looking forward to Snow being in print and hopefully then connecting and resonating with readers in the way I intended when I wrote it.”
Ms Starr, a Melbourne writer and teacher, said she was deeply honoured to have won the award.
“I wanted to tell the story of a woman who insists unyieldingly on her freedom, in the face of so many expectations placed on older women to calm down and to behave,” she said.
“Despite a failing memory, she flees to Italy, to be reunited with the art she has been passionate about for her entire life. She’s often confused, but she remains driven by creativity and hope and a refusal to do what everyone expects.”
This year’s winners, chosen from a shortlist of six titles and over 280 entries, will split the $10,000 prize money and both will be offered a publishing contract with UWA Publishing.