AustLit
History
'The Joan C. Bell Prize is intended to reward inventive and innovative new writing. We’re looking for an unpublished novel that continues the tradition of innovative writers like Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, Witold Gombrowicz, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, William Gass, Thomas Bernhard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, António Lobo Antunes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, László Krasznahorkai, and so on, and then takes this tradition in a new direction.'
Source: Zerogram Press.
Administration
Latest Winners / Recipients
-
Year: 2023
winner y
The Sitter
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2023
26234061
2023
single work
novel
'Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavour, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, subject to the gaze of others, increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?
'Heartbreaking and perfectly formed, The Sitter explores the tension between artist and subject, and between the stories told about us and the stories we choose to tell.' (Publication summary)
