AustLit

'Victorian author Laura Jean McKay has won the top prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards with her debut novel, which imagines a viral pandemic in Australia that gives humans the ability to understand animals.' (Introduction)

'Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch has capped an incredible year of acclaim for her novel The Yield, taking out the $80,000 fiction prize at the Prime Minister's Literary Awards.' (Introduction)

'Melbourne Theatre Company executive director and co-CEO Virginia Lovett describes the impact of the COVID on the company as "a seismic trauma".'

'The year 1996 was one of those 'best of times, worst of times' for Angus Cerini. In perhaps its defining moment, he was beaten up on a train by a group of young men after intervening when they harassed a couple of older women.' (Introduction)

'It's fourth time lucky for Vincent Namatjira, great-grandson of acclaimed artist Albert Namatjira, who has become the first Indigenous Australian to win the $100,000 Archibald Prize in its 99-year history.'

'Actor Meyne Wyatt has won the Archibald Prize's Packing Room Prize for his self-portrait.'

'Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award — Australia's most prestigious writing prize, and one of its richest at $60,000 — for her novel The Yield.' 

'In his 2010 memoir The Family Law, Benjamin Law writes about how when he was a teen, his Uncle Toby (his mum's older brother) came to visit from Canada and was so shocked by the overstuffed, messy state of their home that he staged an intervention and cleared it out in a week.' (Introduction)

'When Perth Festival's incoming artist director Iain Grandage announced that his first edition would open with a week of exclusively Indigenous work, it was a big deal: this has never been done before in Australia.' (Introduction)

'When Ben Quilty duxed Year 11 art (the same year his careers advisor told him not to go to art school), he was presented with a book about Australian landscape painting — and he saw Henry James Johnstone's iconic 1880 painting Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, South Australia.' (Summary)

'Anchuli Felicia King holds the singular distinction among Australian playwrights of having not one or two, but three plays debut on Australian stages in 2019. And the story only gets more interesting from there.' (Introduction)

'In 1786, merchant and former naval officer Francis Light claimed the Malaysian island Penang for the British. Fifty years later, in 1836, his son William, appointed surveyor-general of the colony of South Australia, landed on Kangaroo Island, charged with choosing the location for the capital.'(Introduction) 

'A new play based on the life of Australian tennis champion and Wiradjuri woman Evonne Goolagong Cawley will take centre court at Melbourne Theatre Company next year — literally: the Southbank theatre will be transformed with stadium-style seating banks on either side of the stage.'(Introduction)