UQP titles shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards

We are delighted to announce that Omar Sakr, Angela O'Keefffe and Ellen van Neerven have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier Literary Awards.

The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards are the richest and longest running state-based literary awards in Australia and cover all genres of writing. These annual awards honour distinguished achievement by Australian writers, contribute to Australia’s artistic reputation, and draw international attention to some of our best writers and to the cultural environment that nurtures them.⁠

Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr shortlisted for The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and The Multicultural NSW Award

The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award

Personal Score by Ellen van Neerven shortlisted for The Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, Indigenous Writers' Prize and The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award

The winners will be announced on the 20th of May 2024.

Congratulations to all of the authors shortlisted.

Judges Report

Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr

The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry

Of his poetics in his prize-winning collection The Lost Arabs, Omar Sakr avows: ‘I write toward unbelonging, toward a sense of non-ownership, where I can be my most complex and open self, far from false certainties. It is here I feel most free.’ This uncompromising honesty and courage, the passionate intensity and fierce intelligence, the interweaving of the personal and the political, are also in full evidence in Non-Essential Work. Sakr’s signature traits are further honed, deepened and made more compelling with the experiences of love and loss, and with the assured mastery of poetic craft and form. These are searing, moving poems that have come through the furnace of intense experience, tested and forged into powerful documents of trauma, grief, love and salvation.

One doesn’t just read a Sakr poem, one experiences it; as the poet says: ‘I must put my body where my poetry is’. The Sakr poem is grounded in the body of experience, and the experience of the body, with all its burning questions, its human contradictions, desires, love, hate, and longing. From the first line to the last, each poem in this collection immerses us in its rhythmic flow, its passionate pulse of thought and feeling, and its cogent lyric cadences. The engagement and commitment are total, the imaginative lines of affiliations and empathy extending from personal loss, displacement and grief, from elegiac and haunting glimpses of the poet’s father to a cousin ‘shot in the head’ in Bankstown, to unspeakable tragedies in Kashmir, Gaza, ‘our Uyghur brothers and sisters’ and ‘two Afghan boys whose throats were opened by Australian men’. These poems ask difficult questions and interrogate poetry’s relevance and efficacy (poems that ‘mistake grief for care’). In haunting lines made possible by deft and beautiful handling of form, image and rhythm, Sakr answers the question that Heidegger has posed: ‘What are poets for in these destitute times?’ Non-Essential Work is an important, essential work, its passionate intelligence and lyric intensity making powerful, memorable music of the key themes of belonging and home, politics and grief, loss and love.

The Multicultural NSW Award

With his latest collection of poetry, Omar Sakr has shown that the distance between art and artist can be as narrow as a single page. The poetic is truly personal here, with poems that range from an ode to his love of cheesy fries to that time a spider made it frightening to walk through a doorway. And while each of these poems reveals a wry wit, they are never shallow. There is depth and meaning in each sparkling line, with Sakr’s writing confidently assured in its skill and ability to find meaning in the most mundane of moments.

Non-Essential Work is a deeply Muslim collection of poetry, from the astonishment Sakr experiences at finding his Prophet disrespected so utterly in the bowels of Dante’s Inferno, to the reaction to rising anti-Muslim sentiment and rhetoric in the world around him. Indeed, the most powerful poem might be the blank page under the title ‘Poem after Christchurch’. There is rage and grief in these pages, but the reader will also find hope through inspiration and wonder.

The Sitter by Angela O'Keeffe

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic an Australian writer, locked down in a Paris hotel room, works on her novel about Hortense Cezanne. The fraught writing process is overseen by the ghost of Hortense, who the writer has brought into the living world for various motives, some of which are obvious and others which are not revealed. Both women watch what unfolds before them and what has unfolded within them.

Angela O’Keeffe’s masterful novel addresses the human question around how we create art and how we are haunted by our histories. Deftly she ushers the reader in, makes us privy to the family secrets of both women, all the while inviting us to surrender to the story and the way it is told. The Sitter dramatises the feeling and experience that we all face as contemporary subjects, as consumers, as art-makers, as travellers, as lovers as sitters. This captivating novel reveals striking literary talent.

Personal Score by Ellen van Neerven

The Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction

A masterful exploration of the story of sport in Australia and how it is experienced by First Nations communities. Ellen van Neerven examines the intersectional currents of race, class, sexuality, gender presentation and mental health in experiences of belonging and exclusion on the western sporting field, while paying homage to the role of ancient Indigenous sporting practices and games in community building and physical expression.

In this original and incisive work, examining not only western and First Nations concepts of fair play, sportsmanship, competition and community, van Neerven weaves together rigorous research, experimental forms and personal reflection to paint a historical and intimate portrait of their own experiences with sport, nation and identity. Confronting the racism and discrimination experienced by minority players on the field as emblematic of wider power dynamics in the relationship between black and white Australia off the field, Personal Score is an ambitious and sweeping interrogation of both the joys of sport and the politics of play.

Indigenous Writers' Prize

Personal Score is a hybrid of memoir and poetry against the backdrop of an in-depth exploration of sport on the Australian continent. In this book, Ellen van Neerven has created an endearing personal and political treatise on sport and sport culture, examining their various histories through the lenses of race, gender and sexuality. Though many sports are touched on and some explored in depth, the focus is on football and the larger story unfolds through van Neerven’s enduring love for the beautiful game.

With remarkable breadth and clarity, van Neerven deftly examines the complex relationships between sport, culture, racism, queerness, identity and colonisation in Australia. This book is innovative in style, multidimensional in depth and an insightful exploration of community formation, desire, ancestry and the act of ‘play’, particularly throughout the years of the global Covid pandemic.