UQP authors shortlisted for The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

Congratulations to the UQP authors shortlisted in the 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

In 2025, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLAs) celebrates 40 years. Recognising the best in Australian writing across nine categories, this year's shortlist suite also includes the inaugural John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing, named in honour of the late, great satirist and actor.

The winners of each Prize receive $25,000, and will go on to contest the major prize, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature. This is the single most valuable literary award in the country.

You can also vote for your favourite title across all categories in the 2025 People's Choice Award. Voting in the People's Choice Award puts you in the running for a book pack from the Wheeler Centre.

The winners will be announced March 2025.

Please see the UQP titles and authors shortlisted below.

The Indigenous Writing Prize
Black Witness by Amy McQuire

Judges Report:

Black Witness makes a significant contribution to the field of journalism in this country. Where the media has consistently failed Indigenous people by overlooking Indigenous voices, Amy McQuire (Darumbal and South Sea Islander) restores undeniable power to the scores of unheard Black Witnesses. In this outstanding collection of essays, McQuire’s journalism shines a light on the colonial violence and carceral logic that pervades the treatment of Indigenous peoples – from incarceration to healthcare and education to politics. This is writing that deals in truth, helping us to understand history and the present so we might envision decolonial and abolitionist futures.

John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

Judges Report:

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu is a brilliantly inventive novel that defies categorisation, blending mythology, satire, and surrealism into a narrative as sprawling and strange as the titular cities. Lu’s deft hand guides readers through labyrinthine tales of emperors, traitors, and office workers, crafting a world where history, power, and identity collide in unexpected ways. The novel is laced with biting humour, philosophical musings, and sly commentary on cultural dislocation and self-perception. Lu’s playful, often absurd prose conjures a universe that feels simultaneously ancient and contemporary, highlighting his prowess as a storyteller who delights in upending expectations.

The Children's Writing Prize
Three Dresses by Wanda Gibson

Judges Report:

Three Dresses is a real-life history, a truth-telling, woven with words. Wanda Gibson invites the reader to join a little girl and her family (from the Stolen Generation) on a two-week holiday. Away from the Mission, the family feels 'so happy', and the little girl celebrates the gift of three dresses – 'one to wash, one to wear and one spare'. Each turned page of this picture book gifts the reader a visual feast of illustrations paired with words possessing a distinctive and steady pulse that mirrors the tides of the beach. Three Dresses shares a family’s relationship with place and gives the reader the sense that the word family is a verb meaning to experience freedom with glee.

The Poetry Prize
Gawimarra: Gathering by Jeanine Leane.

Judges Report:

Jeanine Leane’s collection Gawimarra: Gathering is a vital work of imagination which crafts, in three structurally profound sections, a vision for another way of being – both in community and in the world – beyond the institutional violence of this nation’s settler founding. Leane’s work is generous and deftly executed, braiding auto-poetics with sharply observed accounts of the museumisation and scholarly appropriations of an ineluctable First Nations history and culture. Weaving together the knowledge of her elders – a storied people – Wiradjuri language, and shining acuity for the form, Gawimarra: Gathering is an invitation to walk with Leane along new pathways of resistance and to recognise the reality of tangible alternatives to the way we live now.

Always Will Beby Mykaela Saunders has also been highly commended for The Indigenous Writing Prize.

Congratulations again to Amy, Siang, Wanda, Jeanine and Mykaela.