The 2021 winners of the Melbourne Prize for Literature & Awards
The winners of one of the most valuable literature prizes in Australia have been announced!
The winner of the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature 2021 is Christos Tsiolkas for his body of work, which has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life.
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of seven novels, with his work being adapted for film, television and the stage and translated into 22 languages. He has been shortlisted for and is the recipient of a number of major literary Awards. His celebrated past works include Loaded, The Slap, Barracuda, and Damascus, while his most recent novel Seven and a Half is already receiving extensive praise.
Read our review for Tsiolkas’ latest novel Seven and a Half here.
The winner of the NEW $20,000 Professional Development Award 2012 is Evelyn Araluen. The funds are for a project to assist in pursuing the recipient’s writing career.
Evelyn Araluen is a poet and co-editor of Overland, as well as a researcher working with Indigenous literatures at the University of Sydney. Her work has won the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born, raised, and writing in Dharug country, she is a Bundjalung descendant.
Araluen’s latest work is the collection of poetry, Dropbear. You can read our review of the collection here.
The winner of the $15,000 Writer’s Prize 2021 is Eloise Grills for her essay, which is of outstanding originality, literary merit and creative freshness.
Eloise Grills is an essayist, poet and comics artist who is currently working on her first full-length illustrated essay collection, big beautiful female theory (Affirm Press, 2022). Her work has been recognised in awards including the QPF Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word, the Lifted Brow/RMIT Experimental Nonfiction Prize, the Peter Blazey Fellowship, the Felix Meyer Scholarship and the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize. Her graphic novel, Sexy Female Murderesses, was named one of The Saturday Paper’s best books of 2019, and her poetry collection, If You’re Sexy and You Know it Slap Your Hams, was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award.
You can read Grills’ award winning essay The Fat Bitch in Art here.
The winner of the $3,000 Civic Choice Award 2021, is Maxine Beneba Clarke. This award is given to the finalist, in the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2021 and Writer’s Prize 2021, with the highest number of votes received from the public.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent, and the multi-award-winning author of ten published books for children and adults, including the critically acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the Indie and ABIA award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collection Carrying The World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and several acclaimed children’s picture books including the Boston Globe/Horn Prize Winning The Patchwork Bike.
Beneba Clarke’s latest work is the poetry collection How Decent Folk Behave. You can read our review of the collection here.
