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Print Text Feature Writing Long
Subcategory of Walkley Award
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Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2023

winner Being John Hughes Anna Katherine Verney , Richard Cooke , 2023 single work essay
— Appears in: The Monthly , March 2023; (p. 34-48)
'BACK IN THE EARLY 1980S, though he was still an undergraduate at the University of Newcastle, John Hughes was already being described as a genius. He was the fi rst person in his family to attend university. His grandparents, Ukrainians displaced by World War Two, were, according to him, the only people in Cessnock who spoke a language other than English. Amid the culture of the coalfi elds and their “mistrust of words”, as Hughes put it later, he grew up reading Tolstoy under the bed covers, and imagined himself writing “words of the same power and beauty”. The teachers who clamoured around him were amazed by his erudition. He seemed predestined to write. It was as if he was preordained to become a writer.' (Introduction)

Year: 2017

winner Helen Garner

For 'Why She Broke: The Woman, her Children and the Lake'.

Year: 2014

winner Paul Toohey
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