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 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).
  • Paul Eggert and Chris Vening (eds.), The Letters of Charles Harpur and His Circle (Sydney University Press, 2023).

To read the Judges’ comments on the works, please click here.

Call for Nominations for the 2025 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship

The Australian Universities Heads of English (AUHE) is calling for nominations for the 2025 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship, which will be awarded to the best book of literary scholarship published by an Australian-based author in the last twelve months.

Works eligible for the prize in 2025 include 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.

Nominated books need to have been published between 1 July 2023 and 30 June 2025.

The prize is decided by a panel of members nominated by the AUHE executive. This year the panel members are Claire Knowles, Margaret Henderson and Chris Danta. The winner will be announced at the time of the AUHE AGM in late November.

Please forward all nominations to the Chair of the judging panel, Chris Danta: christopher.danta@anu.edu.au by 5pm, Friday 29 August 2025. 

Nominators should supply or ensure access to three copies of the nominated text. Either hard or electronic copies are acceptable, with electronic copies preferred. Authors may self-nominate. If nominating a book, you have not authored, please contact the author of the text you are nominating to avoid duplicate entries. Publishers may also nominate books.

For any queries, please email the Chair of the judging panel.

Update: AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship

From 2025 the Prize is moving to a biennial structure, alternating between a prize for single-author or co-written monographs in one year, and a prize for all other types of books the following. In 2025, the Prize will be awarded to the latter category, i.e. edited collections, reference works, born-digital works equivalent to printed books, bibliographic works of substance and other forms of equivalent scholarly production. 

This will also mean that we are extending the relevant period of publication to the previous two years, so that for this year, eligible books need to have been published between1 July 2023 and 30 June 2025.

Books previously submitted to the prize are eligible for resubmission, providing they meet the above criteria.

AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship 2024

AUHE is pleased to announce that the winner of the AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship 2024 is Claire Knowles, Della Cruscan Poetry, Women and the Fashionable Newspaper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Congratulations!
AUHE also congratulates Eric Parisot and Emmett Stinson on being shortlisted for the Prize.
Please find here the Judges’ Report.

Shortlist: AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship 2024

We are also pleased to publish the shortlist for the AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship 2024 (given in alphabetical order):

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)

4th Triennial Australian Literary Studies Convention CfP: ‘Chaos and Order’

July 2-5, 2024
Western Sydney University
Parramatta South Campus
www.australianliteraryconvention.com

We are pleased to share with you the CfP for the 4th Triennial Australian Literary Studies Convention, an event which brings together major associations for the study of literature in Australia and welcomes scholars and postgraduate students working on any aspect or field of literary studies. It will be jointly held by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association, the Australasian Association for Literature, the Australian University Heads of English, the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, The Australasian Children’s Literature Association, and The Australasian Modernist Studies Network.

The theme of the CfP is ‘Chaos and Order’. To read the full description, please download the call here.

Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2024.
Please send an abstract of 150 words and biographical note of 100 words to Anthony Uhlmann at a.uhlmann@westernsydney.edu.au.

Judges’ Report: 2023 Voss Literary Prize

It is equally a pleasure to announce the Winner of the Voss Literary Prize, thanks to judges Elaine Lindsay (chair), Jumana Bayeh, Christian Bök, Suzie Gibson, and Ann Vickery.
(From the Judges’ Report – please download and read the full version here) From a field of 42 novels, the winner of the 2023 Voss Literary Prize for the best Australian
novel published in 2022 is Robbie Arnott, with Limberlost, published by Text Publishing.
Limberlost is an exquisite account of the life of a man, from boyhood to old age, who cannot find ways to convert his experiences into meaningful language.

AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship 2023: Announcement of Shortlist and Winner

It is a pleasure to announce the Shortlist and Winner of the 2023 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship:

(from the Judges’ Report)
Judging Panel: Prof. Emerita Lyn McCredden (chair), Prof. Denise Varney, and Dr Lorraine Sim.
There were 13 submissions for the 2023 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship, in what
the judges saw as a robust field. Within the wide disciplinary category of “English” represented in the submissions there was an impressive range of methodological and disciplinary approaches: close textual analysis, archival work, cultural studies, historical and literary historical contextual work, theological studies, genre and period studies, gender studies, biography, military studies, single author studies, drama studies. The three shortlisted works are fine examples of the disciplinary diversity of
contemporary literary scholarship.

Shortlisted for the 2023 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship are:
Melinda Cooper
Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction, Sydney Studies in
Australian Literature, 2023.
Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens
Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius, Melbourne University Press, 2023.
Roberta Kwan
Shakespeare, the Reformation and the Interpreting Self, Edinburgh University Press,
2023.
(…)

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!

Please download and read the full Judges’ Report here.