As the systematic biases are stripped away from prize-giving and the reviewing of Australian authors, I do expect we will see more authors from wider and richer backgrounds represented on shortlists for these prizes. And it makes my heart swell, even though it means such a strong competition. These literary awards are the one place in the literary world where year after year, success is a zero-sum game. It strengthens the entire community when the voices of the disenfranchised and the overlooked are represented alongside those who have enjoyed the lion’s share of awards and accolades for so long.

A couple of weeks ago, ABC’s Jonathan Green wrote an article about journalism. In it, he claimed that ‘journalism is a trade in which personal conviction is one of two things: an irrelevance or a death sentence. Journalism tainted by conviction just isn’t. That’s the simple truth of it.’ I suspect among many journalists there is a seductive appeal to this kind of claim. They like to think of themselves as dispassionate and objective, pursuers and reporters of Truth.