Rachel Morton's 'The Sun Was Electric Light' wins the 2025 UQP Quentin Bryce Award.
UQP is pleased to announce that the 2025 recipient of the UQP Quentin Bryce Award is Rachel Morton’s much-anticipated debut novel, The Sun Was Electric Light, which was the winner of the 2024 VPLA for an unpublished manuscript.
This award, which recognises The Honourable Dame Quentin Bryce, is for a book on UQP’s list each year that celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality. Rachel Morton receives $5000 in prize money.
Of selecting The Sun Was Electric Light from UQP’s 2025 list, Dame Quentin Bryce says:
What a special book this is. Tender, poignant and filled with longing for those people and places we’ve lost – and perhaps never truly found in the first place. Rachel Morton’s novel leads us through the ache of grief, for self and others, towards acceptance. It was just the book I needed to sustain me this year and I believe other readers will agree.
On winning the UQP Quentin Bryce Award Rachel says:
I am very honoured to be receiving this award. I didn't think my book would even be published; to be recognised in this way is a surprise and a delight. I am grateful to Quentin Bryce for seeing something in my work, and I am also grateful to her for her life of service, which is an inspiration to women everywhere.
About The Sun Was Electric Light
Disillusioned with her life in New York, Ruth returns to a lake town in Guatemala where she had been happy a decade earlier. There, in Panajachel, she meets two very different women: the calm and practical Emilie, and the turbulent and intoxicating Carmen.
Deciding to stay and build a life at the lake, Ruth finds work first as a nanny to a wealthy local family, then as an English teacher at a village school. Meanwhile, she becomes increasingly infatuated by her friendship with Carmen, pushing away the stability of her connection with Emilie. As Carmen’s fragile relationship with the world splinters, the difference between being a visitor and truly belonging becomes clear, and Ruth is forced to act.
The Sun Was Electric Light is a sublime novel about searching for belonging and a life that makes sense.
About Rachel Morton
Rachel Morton is a writer living on Eastern Maar/Gunditjmara Country in south-west Victoria. Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin Quarterly, The Moth Magazine and various other publications. Rachel was shortlisted for the 2019 Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry. The Sun Was Electric Light is her first novel and won the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
About the UQP Quentin Bryce Award
The award recognises The Honourable Dame Quentin Bryce, who is an alumna of The University of Queensland and was the first woman appointed as a faculty member of its Law School. From 2003 to 2008 she served as the twenty-fourth Governor of Queensland, and from 2008 to 2014 she was the twenty-fifth Governor General of Australia, the first woman to hold the office. Throughout her career Quentin Bryce has been a strong supporter of the arts and Australia’s cultural life, and she is an ambassador for many related organisations, including the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and the Stella Prize.
To honour Quentin Bryce’s impressive career and legacy, University of Queensland Press established the UQP Quentin Bryce Award in 2020. The award recognises one book on UQP’s list each year that celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality. There is $5000 in prize money for the selected author.
The inaugural recipient of the award in 2020 was Ellen van Neerven’s poetry collection Throat, which went on to be recognised in multiple prizes, including winning Book of the Year at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In 2021 the award went to Sarah Walker’s exceptional collection of essays, The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, with its examination of our unruly bodies and minds, and the limitations of consent, intimacy and control. In 2022 the recipient was Mirandi Riwoe’s dazzling story collection, The Burnished Sun, with is focus on women, especially those who are marginalised and disenfranchised, while in 2023 it was Angela O’Keeffe’s The Sitter, which reimagines the life of Hortense Cezanne while intricately examining the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell. The Sitter went on to win the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for fiction. In 2024 Dame Quentin Bryce selected Jazz Money’s superb poetry collection mark the dawn for the award.
Congratulations again to Rachel on her win!
