We asked Australia’s top authors, poets and illustrators – nominees for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – why they chose their career, and their responses are as varied as their creations.

Meredith Lake, The Bible in Australia (Australian History):
Well, I became an historian – and found that it’s all about stories. But I’ve always loved reading, and even as a kid I was often making things with words.

After winning the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition in 2014, Else volunteered at Writers Victoria, worked at the Emerging Writers Festival and studied creative writing at RMIT. Else has been published widely, including Visible Ink, Australian Book Review, The Suburban Review and Offset.  Her fiction has won or been shortlisted for awards such as the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards, the Fair Australia Prize, the VU Overland Short Story Prize and the Margaret River Short Story Competition.

Anna Spargo-Ryan is the Melbourne-based author of The Gulf and The Paper House, and winner of the 2016 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Suicide Gene’. Her work has appeared in The Big Issue, Island, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, Good Weekend, The Guardian, and many other places. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Deakin University and was awarded the 2017 Philip Brown History Award.

Writers Victoria are proud of our association with VALiD and the Dulcie Stone Writing Awards for writers with intellectual disability. Now in its third year, the Awards are drawing out remarkable perspectives and vivid stories from writers who don’t sit around and wait quietly for their turn.