UQP authors win at the 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

We are delighted to congratulate Wanda Gibson, Amy McQuire and Jeanine Leane on winning at the 2025 Victoria Premier's Literary Awards in their respective categories for their titles, Three Dresses, Black Witness& Gawimarra: Gathering.

Now in its 40th year, the VPLAs is one of the most lucrative literary awards in the country, with a total prize pool of $315,000 gifted across the nine categories in the awards suite and an extra $2000 for the People’s Choice Award, gifted by The Wheeler Centre. The overarching winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature also receives a further $100,000, Australia’s single richest literary prize.

Nukgal Wurra author-artist, Wanda Gibson was awarded both the Children's Literature Prize and the Victorian Prize for Literature, for her picture book Three Dresses – marking the first time the winner of the Children’s Prize for Literature has taken out the overall prize.

The judges stated:

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.

Darumbal and South Sea Islander author and academic Amy McQuire was awarded the prize for Indigenous Writing for her non-fiction collection Black Witness.

The judges stated:

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.

Wiradjuri writer, poet, essayist and critic Jeanine Leane was awarded the prize for poetry for her collection Gawimarra: Gathering.

The judges stated:

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.

congratulations to Wanda, Amy and Jeanine once more.