Victorian Premier's Literary Award
The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards were created by the Victorian Government with the aim of raising the profile of contemporary creative writing and Australia's publishing industry.
They were established in 1985 by John Cain, the Premier of Victoria at that time, to mark the centenary of the births of Vance and Nettie Palmer, two of Australia's best-known writers and critics who both made significant contributions to Victorian and Australian literary culture.
From 1986 through till 1997 they were presented as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
In 1997 the administration of the awards was transferred to the State Library of Victoria. By 2004 the award's total prize money was A$180,000.
In 2011, the winers of the main five 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) - contested for the Victorian Prize for Literature. Category winners received $25,000, while the Victorian Prize carried a purse of $100,000, resulting in the overall winner taking home $125,000.
Read more about Victorian Premier's Literary Award: Awards Categories
Famous quotes containing the words victorian, literary and/or award:
“Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another age ... when so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)