The Australian Universities Heads of English (AUHE) is calling for nominations for the 2026 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship, which will be awarded to the best single authored or co-authored monographs of literary scholarship published in the last two years. 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 2024 and 30 June 2026.

The prize is decided by a panel of members nominated by the AUHE executive. This year the panel members are: Ann Vickery, Margaret Henderson, and Dashiell Moore. The winner will be announced at the time of the AUHE AGM, usually in late November or early December.

Please forward all nominations to the Chair of the judging panel, Ann Vickery (ann.vickery@deakin.edu.au) by 5pm, 24 July 2026. 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. The AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship now operates on an alternating cycle. The prize in 2026 is open to monographs; in 2027 the prize will be open to edited collections, scholarly editions, and all other non-monograph book-length works.

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.

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.

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)