Robyn Davidson was a member of the sixties left wing ‘Sydney Push’ movement, and is most well-known for her book Tracks, which documents her solo voyage with camels across the central deserts from Alice Springs to the west coast.

She was awarded the $15,000 Peter Blazey Fellowship (for biography, autobiography, or life-writing), for her ‘imaginary’ portrait of her mother. Davidson was praised by the judges for her ‘intimate and tender study of the bonds between parent and child and how the intertwining of past and present, and of memory and history, reflect and shape Davidson’s own story’; the work offered a ‘new and exciting approach to memoir that crosses the conventional boundaries of genre’.

Yvette R Holt was awarded the $25,000 Kate Challis RAKA Award, which this year was for poetry. The judges commended her poetry for its ‘strong weave of poetic testimony to the roles of Aboriginal women’. Its ‘linguistic richness and engaging variety of lyrical forms’ were also acknowledged.
 
The awards were announced at a gala event at the Melbourne Writers Festival this weekend.
 
The judging panels were:

• Kate Challis RAKA Award: Tony Birch, Don Heathcote, Lyn McCredden, Philip Morrissey, Chris Wallace Crabbe

• Peter Blazey Fellowship: Catherine Cole, Kate Darian-Smith, Tim Herbert, John Hunter

The Australian Centre administers a series of prizes for outstanding endeavour in the visual arts, creative writing and biographical studies. The awards are presented on an annual or biennial basis.

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