‘The Australian/Vogel award, administered by Allen & Unwin Australia, is a privately sponsored literary award which has been operating for twenty-five years. Now worth $20000, the award guarantees publication of the winning manuscript, which must be an unpublished manuscript by an Australian writer who is not more than thirty-five at the time of entry. The Vogel is popularly seen as an award for new novelists, but entries can include a work of fiction for adults or children, a work of non-fiction such as a biography or history, or a work of verse. Further, and this is often forgotten, the writer can have been published previously as long as the entered manuscript itself has not been published.’ (Introduction 162)