The Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2025 Winners have been announced. These awards have a significant prize pool ($600K) and serve to recognise 'established and emerging Australia writers, illustrators, poets and historians'.
The Winners are:
Fiction: Michelle de Krester - Theory and Practice Continuing her sweep of awards this year,
de Krester won the Stella Prize this year and was
shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. This novel tells the story of a young woman in Melbourne in 1986. There to research the novels of Virginia Woolf, she meets Kit and her ambitions change. The judges said: "In
Theory & Practice Michelle de Krester masterfully tests the limits of the novel as a form to investigate power in all its complexity. Moving between fictional, autofictional and essayistic modes, this novel is elegant, playful and razor sharp. It plays with and tests readers' assumptions about authors and narrators, lived experience and fiction, and how these assumptions are shaped by gender, ethnicity and class." I have a copy of this novel and look forward to reading it.
Non-Fiction: Rick Morton - Mean Streak
I am thrilled Rick Morton won for this book on Robodebt - an important work on the illegal federal government scheme which traumatised so many poor people. The judges said: "Morton’s writing redefines people demonised as ‘welfare cheats’ to victims of their own government. Morton combed the ample public evidence to develop a narrative to help the reader understand how modern government overreach occurs.... With single-minded determination, Morton successfully distils a government’s disgrace into an enthralling account of what happens when we lose our collective conscience." I loved Morton's memoir
One Hundred Years of Dirt (2018) and have been an avid reader of his journalism.
Australian History: Geraldine Fela - Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia's AIDS CrisisBringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela shines the spotlight on the compassionate nurses who cared for people with HIV and AIDS. The judges said: "
Critical Care examines Australia’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s from the perspective of health care practitioners and patients. Written with empathy and narrative flair, it takes the reader inside remote Indigenous communities, regional areas, and city hospitals. Built on interviews with over thirty nurses and many of those who survived HIV, Fela maps the human response to a public health emergency with compassion, insight, and an acute eye for telling detail."
The Prime Minister's Literary awards also cover Children's Literature, Young Adult Literature and Poetry. In these categories the following won this year's award:
- Poetry: David Brooks - The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems
- Young Adult: Krystal Sutherland - The Invocations
- Children's Literature: Peter Carnavas - Leo and Ralph
