Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature

Tara June Winch
The Yield
Penguin Random House
A young Indigenous Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land. Exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet a hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon.

Tara June Winch is an Australian (Wiradjuri) writer based in France. Her first novel Swallow the Air, (UQP) 2006 was critically acclaimed. In 2008, she was mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. The novel was listed on the HSC syllabus for Standard and Advanced English from 2009-2020 and a tenth-anniversary edition was published in 2016.

Katrina Nannestad
We Are Wolves
HarperCollins Publishers
When the Russian Army marches into East Prussia at the end of the war, the Wolf family must flee. Liesl, Otto and their baby sister, Mia, find themselves lost and alone, in a blizzard, in the middle of a war zone. Liesl has promised Mama that she will keep her brother and sister safe. But sometimes, to survive, you have to do bad things. Dangerous things. Wild things. Sometimes to survive, you must become a wolf.

About the author
Katrina Nannestad is an award-winning Australian author who grew up in country New South Wales in a neighbourhood stuffed full of happy children. She celebrates family, friendship and belonging in her writing. Katrina also loves creating stories that bring joy to other people’s lives. 
Her books include the CBCA-shortlisted We Are Wolves, The Girl Who Brought Mischief, the Travelling Bookshop series, the Girl, the Dog and the Writer series, the Olive of Groves series, the Red Dirt Diaries series, the Lottie Perkins series, and the historical novel Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief.

Leanne Hall
The Gaps
Text Publishing
When sixteen-year-old Yin Mitchell is abducted, the news reverberates through the whole Year Ten class at Balmoral Ladies College. As the hours tick by, the girls know the chance of Yin being found alive is becoming smaller and smaller.

Helen Ennis
Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography
HarperCollins Publishers
Olive Cotton was one of Australia's pioneering modernist photographers, whose significant talent was recognised as equal to her first husband, the famous photographer Max Dupain. Together, Olive and Max were an Australian version of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or Ray and Charles Eames, and the photographic work they produced in the 1930s and early 1940s was bold, distinctive and quintessentially Australian.

Jordie Albiston
Fifteeners
Puncher & Wattmann
The sonnet is a classic lyric form that has beguiled and perplexed poets for over seven hundred years. In this, her thirteenth collection, Jordie Albiston re-invents the sonnet structure, trading meter for syllabics, and employing fifteen lines in lieu of the traditional fourteen. Themes of destruction and loss, hope and wonder, and the pressing fate of an unstable world, are coded like enduring questions into the machinery of these extraordinary poems.

Peter Beaglehole
Calendar Days
Calendar Days is a performance text about the gig economy and precarious work. We hear from baggage handlers, doctors, retail and hospitality workers, young and old, all who share secrets and fears. They crack jokes and rage at their bosses, talk about their cats, fall in and out of love, and share an unexpected birthday cake. It asks how insecure work shapes our relationships with each other and what solidarity might look like in a fragmented work force.

About the author
Peter Beaglehole has served as Fundraising Coordinator for RUMPUS, a theatre project based out of Bowden. With RUMPUS he presented a work in progress reading as part of their Baby Plays' program, and Strata in their 2021/2021 curated season. Strata was shortlisted in the Jill Blewett Playwrights's Award in 2018 and the 2016 Winner of State Theatre Company of South Australia's Young Playwrights' Award. His work has also been staged in ATYP's Intersection 2017, published by Currency Press, and in the 2013 Come out Festival (Now DreamBig Children's Festival).

Roanna McClelland
The Comforting Weight of Water
The Comforting Weight of Water examines a near future left dramatically altered by societal and climatic forces. For the few survivors, questions of identity, coming of age, love and the natural world are explored through the eyes of a child, against a backdrop of encroaching water.

About the author
Roanna McClelland is an emerging writer of fiction and non-fiction with a background spanning law, politics, media and research. Her work explores conceptualisations of climate, the environment, identity and human nature in modern society.

Poppy Nwosu
Beasts
Poppy Nwosu proposes to use the opportunity granted by the Max Fatchen Fellowship to undertake a complete overhaul of an older YA contemporary draft named Beasts. The original manuscript requires a full rewrite to take advantage of her improved skills since its initial completion many years before. She also intends to drastically change the plot and ending, to create a magical realism novel with a dark mystery at its heart, that focuses on themes of isolation, grief and vulnerability in young people. 

About the author
Poppy Nwosu is an author of young adult fiction. She has published three contemporary novels, Making Friends with Alice Dyson, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Readings Young Adult Book Prize and 2018 Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award, Taking Down Evelyn Tait, which was shortlisted for the 2021 SPN Book of the Year award and her latest novel, Road Tripping with Pearl Nash, which is listed in the CBCA Book of the Year Notables for 2022. She is also the creator of the YA horror anthology Hometown Haunts. 

Rachael Mead
The Art of Breaking Ice
This generous fellowship will be used to the complete writing of Rachael’s second novel The Art of Breaking Ice. The book follows the Antarctic journey of Nel Law, who was the first Australian woman and first female visual artist to set foot on the Antarctic continent in 1961. This generous bursary will allow her to travel to Canberra and Hobart to complete the archival research for the historical aspects of the novel and complete the final draft of the manuscript.

About the author
Rachael Mead is a novelist and award-winning poet and short story writer, with her creative work appearing widely in Australia and internationally. Her debut novel about Adelaide’s paramedics, The Application of Pressure, was published by Affirm Press in 2020. She is also the the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Flaw in the Pattern published by UWAP in 2018. Her latest poetry manuscript, Chlorophyll and Casein, was short-listed in this year’s Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature unpublished manuscript section. In 2019, she spent a month in the Taleggio Valley in Northern Italy on an eco-poetry residency awarded by Australian Poetry. She’s been a film buff since seeing Star Warson the big screen as a child and has reviewed film, literature, and theatre for InDaily since 2012.

Karen Wyld
Lovely's Valley
Karen is currently working on two new novels. One is speculative fiction that reimagines history to liberate Stolen Generations from colonisers’ institutions. The project awarded the 2022 Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship is YA with a gothic-twist, set in the Myponga region. A young Aboriginal girl is reconnected with her grandmother, and together they fight to save endangered Southern Emu-wren’s habitat from developers.

About the author
Karen Wyld is a freelance writer living on the south coast of Adelaide. She’s a descendant of Martu people of the Pilbara region in WA. Her second novel, Where the Fruit Falls, won the 2020 Dorothy Hewitt Award and was listed for other awards. Heroes, Rebels and Innovators, an illustrated non-fiction book for children, is a CBCA 2022 Book of the Year Notable.