Betty Trask Prize and Awards
Subcategory of Awards International Awards
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Notes

  • 'Betty Trask left a bequest to the Society of Authors in 1983 to fund a prize for first novels written by authors under the age of 35 in a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style. The prize money, which totals £20,000, must be used for foreign travel. The prize is open to published and unpublished novels.'

    Source: UK Society of Authors website, http://www.societyofauthors.org/
    Sighted: 28/06/2010

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon Hitch Kathryn Hind , Sydney : Penguin Random House Australia , 2019 15407605 2019 single work novel

'A young woman stands beside a highway in the Australian desert, alone except for her dog and the occasional road train that speeds past her raised thumb. She runs from the people she has lost, from the unsaid, from who she was, but moves ever closer to the things she longs to escape.

'After her mother’s funeral, Amelia is confronted by Zach and is reminded of the relationship they had when she was a teenager. She feels complicit and remains unable to process what happened. So she runs. Her best friend, Sid, is Zach’s cousin and the one person in the world she can depend upon.

'But, of course, the road isn’t safe either. Amelia is looking for generosity or human connection in the drivers she finds lifts with, and she does receive that. But she is also let down time and time again.

'Hitch explores consent and its ambiguities, personal agency and the choices we make. Hitch is raw. We know why Amelia is running, we know why she wants to return … but it’s the road in between that we focus on.

'But this isn’t a horror, or a thriller. It’s the story of twenty-something Amelia and her dog Lucy hitchhiking from one end of the country to the other, trying to outrun grief and trauma.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Year: 2012

winner y separately published work icon The Danger Game Enough : A Novel (Volume I) Kalinda Ashton , 2008 single work novel
— Appears in: Enough : A Novel (Volume I) 2008;

'"Sometimes the only way to manage the daily percolating drip of fear, the corrosive dread of debt and humiliation, is to embrace another sort of terror, to put oneself in danger."

'Alice and Louise are sisters united by a distant tragedy - the house fire their brother burnt to death in fourteen years ago. Alice teaches dirt-poor students at a state high school that the government wants to close while she pursues a tumultuouse relationship with a married man. Louse, a habitual liar and recovering heroin addict, has been playing "the danger game" since she was a child, and she can't stop. But when Louise decides to unravel the truth about her twin brother's death, and seeks out the mother that abandoned them, everything changes.' (From the publisher's website.)

Year: 2010

winner (Award Section) y separately published work icon After the Fire, a Still Small Voice Evie Wyld , North Sydney : Vintage Australia , 2009 Z1608121 2009 single work novel

'Following the breakdown of a turbulent relationship, Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast once owned by his grandparents. There, among the sugar cane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life.

Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents' bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he's conscripted as a machine-gunner in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father.

As these two stories weave around each other - each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce - we learn what binds together Frank and Leon, and what may end up keeping them apart.' (From the publisher's website.)

Year: 2000

winner y separately published work icon The Hunter Julia Leigh , Ringwood : Penguin , 1999 Z129151 1999 single work novel (taught in 23 units)

'An unnamed man, M, arrives at a remote house on the fringe of a vast wilderness and soon disappears into a world of silence and stillness. His one mission: to find the last thylacine, the fabled Tasmanian tiger. She is said to have passed into myth but a sighting has been reported... Uncompromising and compelling, Julia Leigh's stunning first novel does not give up any of its secrets easily. The Hunter is a haunting tale of obsession that builds to an unforgettable conclusion.'

Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 18/03/2011).


'While on his mission, the hunter lodges with a grief-ridden family of outcasts whose father has mysteriously vanished after sighting the Thylacine. The hunter succumbs more than he'd like to the family's scant charms and when tragedy strikes has to further purge his psyche to focus upon his elusive quarry. There is something tantalizing at large here as well as the mythical beast in this soul-stalking story about a group of doomed creatures whose unfortunate extinction is never really in doubt.' - Reviewed by Chris Packham, naturalist and broadcaster

Source: British Union Catalogue http://copac.ac.uk/search?rn=3&au=leigh&ti=hunter (Sighted 14/10/2011)

Year: 1999

winner y separately published work icon Three Dollars Elliot Perlman , Sydney : Picador , 1998 Z131955 1998 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'At once humorous and dramatic, Three Dollars is about Eddie, an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of 38, with a wife, a child and three dollars. How did he get that way? And who is Amanda? He cared about people; he was, Amanda notwithstanding, a good husband, father and son. At any other time the world would have smiled on him. But this was the nineties and the world valued other things. Three Dollars chronicles the present breach of the social contract and its effect on a home near you. It is a brilliantly deft portrait of a man attempting to retain his humanity, his family and his sense of humour in grim and pitiless times: times of downsizing, outsourcing and privatising. It is about the legacy of Thatcherism and its effects on people and their relationships.' (Synopsis)

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