Skip to content
home main static Home
Close this menu

Tasmanian Literary Awards

Tasmanian Aboriginal Writer's Fellowship

The fellowship was open to all unpublished and published Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers living in Tasmania.

The recipient of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Writer’s Fellowship will also be offered a publishing opportunity in Island Magazine in 2023.

Winner

Jennifer Evans

Winner Tasmanian Literary Awards 2022 Badge

Judges’ comments

The shortlists for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Writer’s Fellowship show three writers with exemplary skills and well-crafted writing. While unique in their three perspectives, the writers shortlisted all shared unique senses of personality and perspective in their writing. The shortlisted writers shared passionate and thoughtful submissions that were both refreshingly contemporary and asked of us important questions that require future discussion.

Shortlist

  • Jennifer Evans
  • Jim Everett - puralia meenamatta
  • Adam Thompson

shortlist

Jennifer Evans

Dr Jen Evans is a Queer Dharug woman living on, and with connections to, palawa country, lutruwita (Tasmania), Australia. Jen is a Blaq social and cultural geographer whose research and advocacy blends technology, country and queerness to create safe spaces for Indigenous methodological research. Dr Evans is passionate about community participation and empowerment in decision-making processes, a resilience borne from a lifetime of lived experiences, including being an architect to picking fruit to survive. She now works as an Aboriginal Research Fellow at the College of Health and Medicine, University of Tasmania, to support palawa students to reach their goals through her research. She has won multiple community awards for her business and social impact.

Jim Everett

Jim Everett - puralia meenamatta: born at Flinders Island, Tasmania in 1942. He is from the clan plangermairreenner of the Turbuna (Mt Ben Lomond) people in Tasmania. Jim left school at 14 years to start work. His working life includes 15 years at sea as a fisherman and merchant seaman, in the Australian Regular Army, and over 50 years of formal involvement in the Aboriginal Struggle. With a long history in government Aboriginal Affairs, and community organisations, he has travelled Australia visiting remote Aboriginal communities. Jim began writing poetry at an early age. He wrote his first play, We Are Survivors in 1984 and produced, directed, and acted in it. His written works include plays, short stories, and political papers. Jim has produced and been associate producer in many documentary films, and is published in many anthologies. Since 2019, Jim has lived on Cape Barren Island writing and researching Aboriginal philosophy for a PhD at UTAS.

Adam Thompson

Adam Thompson is an emerging Aboriginal (pakana) writer from Tasmania, who writes contemporary short fiction. In 2016–17, Adam received writing awards through the Tamar Valley Writers Festival and the Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival. Adam has been awarded a First Nations Fellowship at Varuna – The Writers House, several Arts Tasmania grants, and was one of ten recipients of The Next Chapter initiative through the Wheeler Centre. His debut collection Born Into This was shortlisted for the USQ Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection and the 2021 Age Book of the Year Award. In 2022, Born Into This won the international Story Prize: Spotlight Award.