UQP Quentin Bryce Award (2020-)
Subcategory of Awards Australian Awards
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History

Established in 2020, the award is for a UQP book that celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2025

winner y separately published work icon The Sun Was Electric Light Rachel Morton , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2025 29182230 2025 single work novel

'Disillusioned with her life in New York, Ruth returns to a lake town in Guatemala where she had been happy a decade earlier. There, in Panajachel, she meets two very different women: the calm and practical Emilie, and the turbulent and intoxicating Carmen. Deciding to stay and build a life at the lake, Ruth finds work first as a nanny to a wealthy local family, then as an English teacher at a village school. Meanwhile she becomes increasingly infatuated by her friendship with Carmen, pushing away the stability of her connection with Emilie. As Carmen’s fragile relationship with the world splinters, the difference between being a visitor and truly belonging becomes clear, and Ruth is forced to act.'  (Publication summary)

Year: 2024

winner y separately published work icon Mark the Dawn Jazz Money , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2024 28051799 2024 selected work poetry

'A dazzling and impressive follow-up to Money's highly acclaimed debut, how to make a basket.

'We gather marks. Our bodies, our stories, our histories and our world are made of an infinite amount of visible and invisible moments. We make marks to record, to remember, to honour, to protest. We mark time, for no matter how many times the sun sets, always it rises in a new dawn.

'Jazz Money returns with her much anticipated new poetry collection to ask about all the ways we rise to a moment. mark the dawn is a celebration of community and gathering, while negotiating the legacies of intersecting histories as a queer First Nations person. These poems sing out with love declaring that, despite everything that has come before, we remain glorious, abundant, sexy, joyous and determined.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2023

winner y separately published work icon The Sitter Angela O'Keeffe , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2023 26234061 2023 single work novel

'Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, subject to the gaze of others, increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

'Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2022

winner y separately published work icon The Burnished Sun Mirandi Riwoe , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2022 23603525 2022 selected work short story

'This stunning story collection includes two prize-winning novellas along with an impressive range of historical and contemporary stories, all written by characters who yearn to belong and find acceptance.

'From the award-winning author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain come these superbly crafted stories that explore the inner lives of those who are often ignored or misunderstood.

'We follow a migrant mother who yearns to feel welcomed at a kids' party in a local park; a young skateboarder caught between showing loyalty and being accepted; and an Indonesian maid working far from home who longs for the son she's left behind. Bookending this collection are two stunning novellas: Annah the Javanese re-imagines the world of one of Paul Gauguin's models in nineteenth-century Paris, while the highly acclaimed The Fish Girl reworks a classic W Somerset Maugham story from the perspective of a young Indonesian woman.

'With rich emotional insight and a light touch, these wide-ranging stories reveal hidden desires and human fragility.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon The First Time I Thought I Was Dying Sarah Walker , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2021 21280048 2021 selected work essay

'We live in a world that expects us to be constantly in control of ourselves. Our bodies and minds, though, have other ideas.

'In this striking debut, artist and writer Sarah Walker wrestles with the awkward spaces where anatomy meets society: body image and Photoshop, phobias and religion, sex scenes and onstage violence, death and grief. Her luminous writing is at once specific and universal as she mines the limits of anxiety, intimacy and control.

'Sharp-witted and poignant, this collection of essays explores our unruly bodies and asks how we might learn to embrace our own chaos.'

Source : publisher's blurb

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