Kathleen Mitchell Award for Young Writers

Supporting young Australian authors

The Kathleen Mitchell Award is a biennial Award dedicated to encouraging young Australian authors to achieve their dreams.

It was established in 1996 by the will of the late Kathleen Adele Mitchell. Her aim was to encourage “the advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature, to improve the educational style of the authors, and to provide them with additional amounts and thus enable them to improve their literary efforts".

Are you eligible?
To be eligible for this award, you should be an author aged 29 years or less at the time of your book’s first publication.

You must be a resident of Australia for the 12 months preceding the close of entries date and be either Australian or British born or a naturalised Australian.

The award’s value
As a guide the recipient of the 2008 Kathleen Mitchell Award received $7,500.

How to apply
The application form for the Kathleen Mitchell Award 2010 is available here.

Key Dates for the Kathleen Mitchell Award 2010
Closing date for entries is Friday 19 February 2010.
The Winner will be announced in late April 2010.

The Kathleen Mitchell Award 2008
Trust congratulates Randa Abdel-Fattah who has won the 2008 Award for her novel, Ten things i hate about me published by Pan Macmillan Australia. 

Read the Judging Panel’s formal comments

About Randa Abdel-Fattah

Randa Abdel-Fattah's first novel, Does My Head Look Big in This? was an instant bestseller in Australia. She is a 26-year-old lawyer, born in Australia of Palestinian and Egyptian parents. For years Randa has been active in the inter-faith community, regularly giving talks at high schools, and is one of the original members of a Melbourne-Palestinian/Jewish women's friendship group. Over the years Randa has been a member of a number of Palestinian human rights campaigns, the Australian Arabic council and various Australian Muslim women networks. She lives in Sydney with her husband and baby daughter.

For this year’s award, the judging panel also selected Rohypnol, by Andrew Hutchinson (Vintage, Random House Australia) and The Gospel According to Luke, by Emily Maguire (Brandl & Schlesinger) for special commendation.

The Kathleen Mitchell Award 2008 judges were Susan Geason, Cameron Morley and Camilla Nelson.

Previous Winners
Previous winners of the Kathleen Mitchell Award include:

• 2006 Markus Zusak The Book Thief (Picador) 
• 2004 Lucy Lehmann The Showgirl and the Brumby (Random House Australia)
• 2002 no award 
• 2000 Julia Leigh The Hunter 
• 1998 James Bradley Wrack 
• 1996 Sonya Hartnett Sleeping Dogs

Further information
Trust is the trustee for the Kathleen Mitchell Award.