Nominations for the 2016 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature are open, with a prize pool of $167,500 on offer in one of the nation’s richest and most competitive literary prizes.

Arts Minister Jack Snelling said the awards, held every two years, were a fantastic opportunity to highlight the very best of our writers and reward excellence in the writing community.

“The winners will be announced in a presentation at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden during the 2016 Adelaide Writers’ Week, which is held as part of the Adelaide Festival,” Mr Snelling said.

“The coveted Premier’s Award is selected from the winners of all the national categories.

“With a $25,000 prize the Premier’s Award is one of the richest in the country, recognising the best published book among all the national awards presented.”
Renowned Australian writer Frank Moorhouse won the Premier’s Award in 2014 for Cold Light, the third in his award-winning trilogy about a woman’s entry into the world of diplomacy in the 1920s.
Introduced by the South Australian Government in 1986, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature are managed by Arts SA, and offer five national awards and two awards and three fellowships specifically for South Australian writers.

The other national awards are the:

•  Children’s Literature Award ($15,000);
•  Fiction Award ($15,000);
•  John Bray Poetry Award ($15,000);
•  Non-Fiction Award ($15,000); and
•  Young Adult Fiction Award ($15,000).

The South Australian awards are the:

•  $12,500 Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award, which supports the creative development of a play by a South Australian writer with the assistance of the State Theatre Company of South Australia; and
•  The Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award, which includes $10,000 for the winner and the publication of the winning manuscript by Wakefield Press.

The three SA Fellowships designed to provide South Australian writers with a day-to-day living allowance while they pursue their writing projects are the:

•  $15,000 Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship, open to writers working in the areas of fiction, poetry, drama, scriptwriting, autobiography, essays, major histories, literary criticism or other expository or analytical prose;
•  $15,000 Max Fatchen Fellowship for South Australian writers for young people; and
•  $15,000 Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship introduced in 2014 and open to South Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers of fiction, literary non-fiction, poetry and playwriting.

Entries to the Adelaide Festival awards for literature close at 5pm on Friday 26 June, 2015.
Information about the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature is available at http://arts.sa.gov.au/grants/adelaide-festival-awards-for-literature/.