2024 Postgraduate Prize Results

Scholarly Stream

Winner: Kendrea Rhodes for Footsteps and Corridors—unsilencing the asylum gene: A Mad Studies, history and creative practice approach to memorialising the fragmented histories of the Ballarat Asylum

Judge Dr Nadia Mead writes:
Footsteps and Corridors—unsilencing the asylum gene: A Mad Studies, history and creative practice approach to memorialising the fragmented histories of the Ballarat Asylum, by Kendrea Rhodes, showcases a distinctive voice that skilfully balances objectivity and subjectivity. Its originality comes from compelling subject matter, told with a blend of academic rigour and creative elements that enhance the storytelling. The work is of great significance as it resonates with both those who have experienced mental health challenges and those who have not, whilst also giving a voice to those whose stories have been silenced over decades. By meshing personal experience with the histories of others, the piece builds a powerful picture of Ballarat Asylum, its history, and its enduring legacy.

Creative Stream

Winner: Karen Martin for Awakening the Minotaur: Exploring the Interplay Between Personal Experience, Creative Decisions, and Aphantasia in Life Writing.

Judge Dr Jessie Seymour writes:
Martin’s paper is an engaging and thoughtful look at how writing memoir feels – not just the act of writing, but its emotional weight and ‘felt experience’. Martin draws on delightfully rich metaphors, other creative works, and academic sources to create a very readable hybrid of scholarship and memoir. Negotiating new knowledge with the past, and the expressed frustrations with memory, are all well-expressed and very poignant, and the embodied cognition concept is thoughtfully explored. I look forward to seeing more of Martin’s work in the future.

Past winners

• 2023
  • Scholarly: Triple threat: (Screen)writing queer adaptions in the academy by Dante DeBono
  • Creative: Tacit: an invitation to discourse (performance) by Bethany Evans
• 2022
  • Scholarly: Trauma-Informed Editing Practice: A Framework by Camilla Cripps
  • Creative: The Many Homes of Home: Slow Lessons in Urgent Times by Julie Vulcan
• 2021 – Online symposium: no prizes awarded this year.
• 2020
  • Scholarly: Writing on Thresholds: ekphrasis, collaboration, and threshold poetics by Molly Murn (Flinders University)
    • Runners-up: Alternating Narration and Communal Mode in Unnatural Feminist Narrative by Alberta Natasia Adji (Edith Cowa​n University) and Escape from the Moskoe-strom: Disrupting the whirlpool of shame to restore connection by Elizabeth Bellamy (University of Canberra)
  • Creative: Strewn Scrabble Letters: exploring the writerly self and grieving self in grief memoir by Marina Deller-Evans (Flinders University)
    • Runners-up: Fractured futures, distant visions:  reckoning with a dis-connective creative writing process by Heather McGinn (University of South Australia) and Rising Tides, Rising Intuition: On the Necessity of Poetry Now More than Ever, A Metatextual Hybrid Essay in Four Parts by Kimberly K. Williams (University of Canberra)

Past AAWP Postgraduate Prizes

In past years, the Postgraduate Prize for most outstanding conference paper was open to postgraduate participants in the AAWP annual conference. It aimed to encourage and reward excellence in research and scholarship in creative writing, and papers were ranked according to the following criteria: clarity of the research question; significance of the inquiry; originality in thought and approach; appropriateness of the writing style. Prizes totalled $400, and the winner was offered the opportunity to co-edit the conference proceedings.

CREATIVE PAPER

PAST WINNERS:

2016: Rowena Lennox (University of Technology Sydney) ‘Coolooloi’ 2015: Amelia Walker (University of South Australia) ‘“I” has to give: Rethinking Bloom’s apophrades and/as ghostly Derridean gifts’

HIGHLY COMMENDED:

2016: Caitlin Malling (University of Sydney) ‘Spending a Month with William Stafford in Oregon’

CRITICAL PAPER

PAST WINNERS:

2016: Rachel Franks (University of Sydney) ‘Stealing stories: Punishment, profit and the Ordinary of Newgate’ 2015: Amelia Walker (University of South Australia) ‘Re-Collecting the Self as An o/Other: Creative writing research matters’ 2014: Lisa Smithies (Melbourne University) ‘Playing with Gaps: Cognitive Science and the Creative Writer’. Extract from judges’ comments: a balanced, generous and memorable piece of writing.

HIGHLY COMMENDED:

2016: Jason Nahrung’s (University of Queensland) ‘Stolen Futures: The Anthropocene in Australian science fiction mosaic novels’ 2015: Caitlin Maling (Sydney University) ‘Collage and ecopoetry in Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses’ 2014: Shari Kocher (Melbourne University) ‘Flying into the eye of the volcano: Dickinson’s volcano imagery in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red’. Extract from judges’ comments: This paper is extremely erudite. It weaves fine threads with a poised hand. Click here for information about the next Annual Conference Any questions about our prizes? Email prizes@aawp.org.au