WA Premier’s Book Awards adds emerging writers category

20 December 2013 Books+Publishing

The Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards will include an award for emerging writers for the first time in 2014.

The $10,000 Western Australian Emerging Writers Award will be awarded to a published work by a debut author, writing in any genre, who lives in Western Australia. The award is not open to self-published works.

WA Culture and Arts Minister John Day announced the introduction of the new award on 13 December. He said in a statement that he hopes the new award category ‘will assist the state’s aspiring writers to follow in the footsteps’ of past winners of the awards, including Tim Winton, Shaun Tan, Elizabeth Jolley and Gail Jones, who have had ‘distinguished careers both nationally and internationally’.

The WA Premier’s Book Awards includes awards for fiction, nonfiction and children’s books, which are all worth $15,000, as well as awards for poetry, WA history, writing for young adults and scriptwriting, which are each worth $10,000. Two $5000 awards are also presented in the digital narrative and people’s choice categories, as well as the overall Premier’s Prize, which is worth $25,000 and presented to one of the category winners.

To see the winners of this year’s awards, click here. For more information about entering the awards, click here.

Category: Local news