David Brooks wins the 2025 Patrick White Literary Award

Congratulations to poet, writer and educator David Brooks who has been awarded the 2025 Patrick White Literary Award.

The Patrick White Literary Award is an annual prize established by author Patrick White, who used his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature to establish a trust for the award. The $20,000 cash prize is given to a writer 'who has been highly creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition.'

The award trustee Perpetual said the award is 'a richly deserved recognition of [Brook's] profound and wide-ranging contributions to Australian literature, contemporary poetry, and environmental thought'.

The judging committee, comprising Sarah Holland-Batt (chair), Sophie Cunningham and Elizabeth McMahon, said:

Brooks’s contributions to Australian literature have been profound, but perhaps because his oeuvre has been spread across so many different forms and genres – each with its own audience – his output has not always been readily appreciated in its totality. The Patrick White Literary Award is a hugely deserving recognition of David Brooks as an outstanding Australian writer, thinker, scholar, educator who has had a major influence on contemporary poetry and environmental thought. The judges hope that recognising Brooks’s work with this honour will encourage more readers and writers to his stellar body of work, and thank him for his gifts to Australian writing.

On receiving the award, David said:

This is a very special award and means a great deal to me: that it cannot be applied for; that it’s assessed by a panel of one’s peers; that it’s not given for a particular book but recognises work in numerous genres and over a long stretch of time. Its first recipient [Christina Stead] was a remarkable novelist whose work I’ve always admired; its second [David Campbell] was a friend, a major poet of the landscape I was born into, and wrote one of my all-time favourite poems. Since then the list of recipients has included many of the best and most interesting Australian writers of the last fifty years. I never expected to be in such company, am greatly honoured, and a little stunned, to find myself there, but, like a cat who suddenly discovers it’s got ten lives after all, will do all I can to confirm my place.

David's publisher, Madonna Duffy, said:

UQP has been David Brooks’ publisher since the mid-2000s across a number of novels, short story collections, non-fiction and poetry volumes, including his most recent book, 'The Other Side of Daylight', which last month won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. It has been a career honour and personal pleasure for me to work with David across these books and years. His immense literary knowledge, his intellect, his commitment to animal rights and, of course, his incredible writing talent have been an inspiration to me. Winning the Patrick White Literary Award is a fitting comma (and certainly not a full stop) in his impressive career.

About David Brooks

David Brooks is the author of five previous collections of poetry and several novels and works of short fiction. His The Book of Sei (1985) was heralded as the most impressive debut in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey’s. His novel The Fern Tattoo (UQP, 2007) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The Sydney Morning Herald called his collection of poetry, The Balcony (UQP, 2008), ‘an electric performance’. Until 2013 he taught Australian Literature at The University of Sydney. In recent years he has devoted his writing increasingly to animal advocacy. He lives with rescued sheep in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. In 2014 he was awarded a 2015/16 Australia Council Fellowship for services to Australian and international literature.

Congratulations once again David on being recognised and awarded for your contributions to the Australian literary landscape.