Author(s): Chloe Brien

Essays

The seventh edition of Award Winning Australian Writing (AWAW) continues its commitment to showcasing the best short stories and poems that have won competitions around the country. Like the 2013 anthology, this year's collection will feature over fifty writers and competitions, promoting the work of both emerging and established authors. '...if it weren't for this publication, most of the winning pieces collected here could easily have been sucked into the darkness of desk drawers and swiftly forgotten. But, thanks to this book, these stories and poems are still being read. And for that, I am grateful this series exists.' - from a review by Bronwyn Lovell in Lip magazine AWAW's past six editions were received very favourably, being edited by Adolfo Aranjuez, previous in-house editor of Melbourne Books, and now editor of film and media magazine Metro, the subeditor of media literacy magazine Screen Education and a member of Writers Victoria's editorial committee. Past editions of AWAW received support from Lisa Dempster (Melbourne Writers Festival director), Philip Rainford (Fellowship of Australian Writers president), and authors Arnold Zable, Delia Falconer and Mark Tredinnick - who have all written forewords for the book. The critic Matthew Lamb, in The Australian, commended the 'invaluable service' AWAW offers to the literary community, while in The Age reviewer Lorien Kaye celebrates that AWAW gives readers a chance 'to value these winners'. Similar sentiments are expressed by author Irma Gold, who wrote in Overland that AWAW is 'a must read' and The Advertiser critic Patrick Allington, who praised the 'impressive new voices' and 'energy and inventiveness' collected in the book. Most recently, Lip magazine praised the way AWAW 'acts as a panoramic snapshot of the writing industry', and ArtsHub reviewer Oliver Mol noted that AWAW 'proves that there are writers in this country pushing boundaries and exploring literature in modern ways'. Competitions appearing in AWAW 2014 include the John Marsden Award for Poetry, the Writers Victoria Grace Marion Wilson Competition, the Verge Annual Prize for Fiction, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and the Overland Short Story Competition. The authors featured in the 2014 edition have in the past won competitions such as The Age Short Story Competition, the Josephine Ulrich Literature Prize, the Australian Book Review Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award, the Aurealis Award and the Blake Poetry Prize.