The AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship is awarded to the best book of literary scholarship published by an Australian-based author in the previous twelve months. Works eligible for the prize include single-author or co-written monographs, multi-authored books including edited collections, reference works, born-digital works equivalent to printed books, bibliographic works of substance and other forms of equivalent scholarly production.
All forms of literary scholarship are acceptable, including critical, theoretical, empirical, historical, textual and so on. Interdisciplinary scholarship is not precluded though a work must engage with what is understood as books and writing in whatever form.
The prize is decided by a panel of members nominated by the AUHE Executive.
The winner is announced at the time of the AUHE AGM, usually in late November or early December.
2025 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship: Shortlist and Winner
We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship (edited collections and critical editions):
Dashiell Moore and Philip Morrissey (editors), Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics (Palgrave, 2025). Congratulations!
The judging panel’s comment the work:
This collection of essays, poems, and interviews on the poetry and politics of Yoogum and Mununjali poet, Lionel Fogarty fairly crackles with revolutionary energy. Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics is a landmark book—a collection that seeks, in the words of senior editor Philip Morrissey, to be “a material sign of what is now, in a sociological sense, a field of study.” Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume—universally of a very high quality—present the reader with a vision of a ‘Forgartian’ poetics that centres the poet’s radical engagement with matters of language (Arlie Alizzi’s chapter on swearing is a particular highlight), transnational solidarity, love and (often state-sanctioned) violence. The panel was particularly impressed by both the originality and the generosity of the approach taken in this collection. Moore and Morrissey bring together the voices of indigenous scholars and settler scholars, senior figures in the field alongside those who are just emerging. This is a highly readable and accessible book that seeks to begin a dialogue between critics and poets; between countries and cultures; and between languages, both indigenous and non-indigenous.
The shortlisted volumes are the following:
- Jumana Bayeh, Helen Groth, and Julian Murphet (eds.),Writing the Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Judges’ comment: We commend the editors for this collection of essays: it is highly topical, ambitious, and engagingly written. The range of essays and consistency of scholarship are impressive, making the collection a substantial contribution to literary studies and to broader fields of scholarship on riots. Essays range across historical periods, literary genres, nations and places, and methodologies. We have, for instance, a comparative analysis of Shakespeare, Brecht, and contemporary representations of riots; a discussion of the riot as featured in post-1960s American poetry; a keywords type approach to unpacking the vexed term, “the mob”; examinations of contemporary political protest in Moroccan, Egyptian, Hong Kong, and Lebanese writing; careful historical scholarship that unpacks the sounds of Georgian riots; and a fascinating account of teaching Ulysses in a South African context. The diverse contents make the collection a genuinely global account of riots and political dissent in literature and extends our understanding of literatures beyond the West and the contemporary.
- Paul Eggert and Chris Vening (eds.), The Letters of Charles Harpur and His Circle (Sydney University Press, 2023).
Judges’ comment: A landmark publication, this is the first collection in print of the letters of one of the most important poets of the Australian colonial period: Charles Harpur. Meticulously researched, edited, and annotated by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening, this selection of two hundred letters of Harpur and his circle show Harpur pursuing the vocation of the poet in the colonial New South Wales of the early nineteenth century. A kind of textual biography by proxy, Eggert and Vening are as much interested in the productive instability of Harpur’s texts as they are in his intellectual and cultural circles. Harpur was a thoroughgoing revisionist of his own poems and would offer his revised works for republication in the periodicals of the day. His understanding of the contemporary print culture meant that this culture in turn shaped his practice as a poet. As Eggert and Vening note, “the letters perform something like a geological cross-section through Australian colonial culture.” This book and its attendant digital apparatus are invaluable resources for anyone interested in Australian print culture of the early nineteenth century, a time when the literary form of poetry exerted greater cultural influence than it does today. Whether you come to it wanting to learn about the political machinations of the publishing circles of the period or about the facilitating role of Sydney newspapers in the colonial project, or just to read a colonial job reference, this is your book.
To download a copy of the judging panel’s report, please click here.
2024 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship: Shortlist and Winner
The shortlist for the AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship 2024 (given in alphabetical order) is:
- Knowles, Claire. Della Cruscan Poetry, Women and the Fashionable Newspaper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
- Parisot, Eric. Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
- Stinson, Emmett. Murnane (The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing, 2023)
AUHE is pleased to announce that the winner is Claire Knowles, Della Cruscan Poetry, Women and the Fashionable Newspaper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Congratulations!
Please download here the Judges’ Report.
2023 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship: Winner
(Judges’ Report – download it here)
The winner of the 2023 Australian University Heads of English Prize for Literary
Scholarship is Melinda Cooper, Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar
Fiction, Sydney Studies in Australian Literature, 2023. Congratulations!
2022 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship: Judges’ Report
The Judges’ Report for the 2022 AUHE Prize is now available. Please click here to download it.
2021 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship: Winner
The winner of the 2021 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship is Paul Giles, for The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions (Oxford University Press). Congratulations!
Read the Judges’ comment here.
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