Overland, the judges and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are thrilled to announce the final results of the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

Overland, the judges and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are thrilled to announce the final results of the 2022 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize.

Think of how different our literary world would look if we read everything blind. You would never have to read a story, as many critics, academics, reviewers and judges do, and note that because it is written by a white heterosexual male, it must possess merit. A phenomenon Hustvedt refers to as the ‘masculine enhancement effect’. Readers may not, as many do, pick up a book by a person of colour, and look for the traumatic, moral story at its heart.

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.

Indyk seems to think that the marketplace is a swelling crowd of populist barbarians – possibly an image that would be appreciated by Pratchett – but not (to his mind) comprised of the ‘true’ readers of literature. Quality and appeal are not mutually exclusive. In attempting to distinguish the ‘marketplace’ from cultural appreciation, Indyk wrests from the readers of books the power to be considered and conscious of what they read. He seems to think that the people who read Pratchett are different from the people who read Marquez, but he has no evidence of this.