Congratulations to Brooke Dunnell, who tonight won the 2021 Fogarty Literary Award, receiving a $20,000 cash prize and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press for her novel The Glass House.
The Fogarty Literary Award is open to Western Australian writers aged 18 to 35, and Brooke only narrowly scraped in, turning 35 a week after the award deadline. She is widely published in the short fiction genre, and her collection Female(s and) Dogs was a finalist in the 2020 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. She lives in Perth and has worked as a creative writing mentor and workshop facilitator.
The judges described The Glass House as
an assured work of fiction, full of well-drawn characters, an involving plot and an ultimately affirming message…36-year-old Julia presses pause on a fractured relationship with her husband Rowan in Melbourne in order to fly to Perth to begin the difficult task of cleaning up her father’s house and helping him to move into an aged-care facility. From the childhood friend Julia runs into in the supermarket, to the dog that she finds her father suddenly minding, to the recurring bad dreams she begins to have about her stepdaughter, this novel is full of tension, complex emotion and surprises.
Being shortlisted for any award is a mark of great achievement, so congratulations also to the other shortlisted authors, Patrick Marlborough for A Horse Held at Gun Point (novel) and Georgia Tree for Old Boy (narrative non-fiction). Both will be working with Fremantle Press editor Georgia Richter on further developing their manuscript, which is a wonderful opportunity in itself.
And I want to mention the five authors whose manuscripts the judging panel chose to recognise as highly commended. Huge congratulations to Alex Dook, Daniel Juckes, Emily Paull, Luke Winter and Alice Woodland—I hope their manuscripts also find the right publishing home.
It’s heartening to see so many talented young writers hitting their stride.
The goal of the award sponsors the Fogarty Foundation is to ‘support and provide educational and leadership opportunities for young people across the spectrum of the Western Australian community’, and how good it is to see literature recognised as a vehicle for that.
looking up/looking down 