Tweed author shortlisted for Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

TWEED author Mykaela Saunders has been shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the nation’s richest literary prize.

Saunders’ Always Will Be: Stories of Goori sovereignty from the futures of the Tweed is among five works named in the fiction category.

Writing Australia director Wenona Byrne said the awards celebrated the highest expression of literary excellence.

“These awards celebrate the highest expression of literary excellence, and we warmly congratulate the shortlisted authors and illustrators on this recognition of their outstanding work,” Byrne said.

The collection, which won the 2022 David Unaipon Award, is set in future versions of the Tweed and imagines how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty, reclaiming country, practising full self-determination or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric, while responding to a changing climate.

Saunders, of Dharug descent, belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family.

The winners will be announced on September 29 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.

Each category winner will receive $80,000, with all shortlisted authors awarded $5,000.

Other fiction contenders include Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane, Juice by Tim Winton, Rapture by Emily Maguire and Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser.

“This year marks the first delivery of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards under Writing Australia. The Awards are a key part of our commitment to supporting the literature sector, and we are proud to celebrate these works as part of a new era in Australian writing,” Byrne said.

This year’s shortlists were selected from 645 entries across the six categories: fiction, non-fiction, Australian history, poetry, children’s literature and young adult literature.