Our heartfelt congratulations to Alexis Wright, who has been named winner of the 2018 Stella Prize for Tracker. Her book is a collective memoir on the visionary Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth.

Berry’s Mirror Sydney has topped the nonfiction category, and Castro’s Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria has won for fiction t the 2018 Mascara Avant-garde Awards.

Felicity Castagna’s fiction novel No More Boats has been shortlisted for the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Fiction writers Gerald Murnane and Ali Alizadeh have been longlisted for the 2018 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal for their respective works Border Districts and The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc.

Running from 30 April to 6 May at Carriageworks, the program – designed around the theme of ‘power’ by artistic director Michaela McGuire – will include sessions with Alexis Wright, Vanessa Berry, and Fiona Wright in conversation with New Zealand author Ashleigh Young. It will also include a panel discussion featuring Maryam Azam.

Tracker by Alexis Wright and This Water: Five Tales by Beverley Farmer have been longlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize.

Young will be speaking at two sessions alongside Patricia Lockwood, Sarah Krasnostein and Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. Castagna will join Michelle de Kretser to discuss issues of migration and Australian culture as explored in No More Boats.

Giramondo poets Corey Wakeling and Shevaun Cooley will be appearing across six sessions at the 2018 Perth Writers Week as part of the Perth International Arts Festival. Each poet has a festival session dedicated to their latest work.

Congratulations to Alexis Wright for being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Nonfiction for her most recent book, Tracker, and to Jennifer Maiden for being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry for her collection, The Metronome.

We congratulate Antigone Kefala for being shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with her poetry collection, Fragments.

This year the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, given to an outstanding collection of poetry by an Australian writer, was awarded to Antigone Kefala for her poetry collection Fragments.

It is extraordinary how devoted we are to the north, when we take our literary bearings in Australia.

Brian Castro will attend this year’s International Literature Festival being held in Berlin. Castro has been selected to attend the festival as part of the Literatures of the World program, which features world-renowned authors as well as new discoveries from the fields of prose and poetry.

Congratulations to Aden Rolfe who has won this year’s Mary Gilmore Award, a prize given to the best first book of poetry published in the previous year.

Yes, poetry is an elitist pursuit, since not everyone can write it, nor can everyone read and enjoy it. Yet it is still the most democratic, maybe even anarchic of the written/spoken arts. Rarely beholden to any writers centre/book club/festival/market place, we truly can write as we please, and if readers have to meet us some of the way and adjust…so be it.

Congratulations to Michelle Cahill whose short story collection Letter to Pessoa won the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, a prize which recognises a published book of fiction written by an author who has not previously published a book-length work of narrative fiction or narrative non-fiction.