Prize announcement: Good news and bad news
Posted by: Kaite Stover
On the eve of the announcement for the call for entries for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Queensland Premier announced the cessation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Both awards are two of Australia’s most valuable and noteworthy awards for literary achievement.
Due to budget cuts, the Queensland Premier’s government is no longer funding the awards. This decision has been met with anger among Australia’s authors. In The Courier of Ballarat, Victoria, Peter Temple, one of Australia’s top authors and a recent winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, was exceptionally vocal.
Temple noted awards such as the Franklin and Victorian Premier prizes are far more meaningful for the authors and the readers than a hefty purse, “they celebrate the place of the book in our culture. They tell the world we value books and the people who write them.”
Prizes are awarded in numerous categories for both the Queensland and Victoria literary awards: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, youth and teen literature, plays, film and television writing. Quite a few eyes are turned on the Victorian Prize for Literature, the most valuable of Australia’s literary prizes.
Book group readers and leaders will see many familiar names on the lists of previous winners of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
