Information, inspiration and insights into the writing life
Welcome to our monthly brag about our Writers Victoria community members who have won awards, been shortlisted or longlisted for writing prizes or received industry recognition.
The shortlists for 2019 NSW Premier’s History Awards Young people’s history prize have been announced. Amongst the shortlist are:
Young people’s history prize
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.
Writing may be a solitary pursuit, but it doesn’t follow that being a writer means resigning yourself to loneliness and isolation. Writing communities, large and small, exist in all kinds of forms, catering to all kinds of writers. Some communities develop organically.
Writers Victoria congratulates and welcomes the 2019 Glenfern Fellows:
Andy Griffiths is one of the most popular children’s authors in Australia. He has written more than 30 books, including nonsense verse, short stories, comic novels, picture books and plays. His books have been New York Times bestsellers, won more than fifty children’s choice awards, been adapted as theatre shows and sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. He is best known as the author of the JUST!
The artistic protagonist is a familiar figure in young adult fiction – the performance poet overcoming trauma onstage, the fan-fic writer finding their own story offline, the photographer shooting shadows in laneways … Art in YA, as in life, is bound up in character identity and agency. Emily Gale spoke to Writers Vic about the role of the artist in her work.
I have always been fascinated with how cinema depicts writers and the craft of writing. Much of what appears on the big screen, the huge publicity tours and massive advances, is pretty far from the mark in terms of reality for all but the most successful authors. That said much a lot that cinema gets right: the hard grind of getting the words on a page to make the deadline, dealing with rejection, struggling with envy in relation to more successful colleagues, the constant effort of staying relevant, etc.
