The Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu announced changes to the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards this morning at the Wheeler Centre. In 2011, five awards, each with a purse of $25,000, will be awarded in the following categories: fiction (the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction); non-fiction (the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction); poetry (the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry); drama (the Louis Esson Prize for Drama); and young adult (the Prize for Writing for Young Adults).
The winners of these five categories will contest the Victorian Prize for Literature, which carries a purse of $100,000. The overall winner will take home $125,000, the largest purse for a writer’s prize in Australia.
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript and for Indigenous Writing will not be offered in 2011. The $15,000 award for an Unpublished Manuscript will be presented to coincide with the Emerging Writers’ Festival in May 2012. The $20,000 biennial award for Indigenous Writing will be presented in September 2012 to coincide with Indigenous Literacy Day.
The Premier announced a new initiative, the Premier’s 21 - 21 books, comprising all the titles shortlisted across the five categories in contention for the big prize. There’s six weeks of great reading before the winner is announced in early September.
Finally, the Premier announced a commitment to provide ongoing support for the City of Literature initiative of $250,000 per year, plus indexation.
The closing date for nominations for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards is Friday, May 20, 2011. Click here to download the guidelines and nomination form.