UQP announces 2023 recipient of the UQP Quentin Bryce Award
UQP is pleased to announce that the 2023 recipient of the UQP Quentin Bryce Award is Angela O'Keeffe’s superb, thoughtful novel The Sitter, which will be published in August 2023. The Sitter was recently described as ‘spellbinding … an elegant mosaic that interrogates power, female relationships, and the purpose of art.’
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. Angela O’Keeffe will receive $5000 in prize money.
Of selecting The Sitter from UQP’s 2023 list, Dame Quentin Bryce says:
‘The Sitter is a gem of a novel – thoughtful, multilayered and profound – whose subject matter combines two of my lifelong interests: literature and art. The Sitter examines the inspiration and source material for both a novel and an artwork, while connecting two women who exist a century apart yet now find themselves bound together in Paris in early 2020. It’s a special and unusual book and one that I am delighted to select for the 2023 UQP Quentin Bryce Award.’
On receiving the award, Angela O'Keeffe says:
‘I feel grateful and honoured that The Sitter has been chosen for the UQP Quentin Bryce Award for 2023. I have much respect and admiration for The Honourable Dame Quentin Bryce for her work in championing the voices of women, and am especially delighted that my novel about two women whose stories have in many ways been appropriated or silenced by others, has received this recognition. My sincere thanks to Quentin Bryce.’
About The Sitter
Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?
Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.
About Angela O’Keeffe
Angela O’Keeffe grew up with nine siblings on a farm in the Lockyer Valley, Queensland. She completed a Master of Arts in Writing at UTS, and her first novel, Night Blue, was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She was awarded the 2023 Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship.
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.
For more information please contact Sally Wilson or Jean Smith, Marketing & Publicity Managers at UQP, on sally.wilson@uqp.com.au or jean.smith@uqp.com.au
