Melbourne’s incredible pool of writers does not go unrecognised, with many prizes celebrating our rich literary landscape.

As a result, this city is home to one of Australia’s most valuable literary awards, the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Other prizes include the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, given in seven categories (fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, young adult, children’s writing and indigenous writing), the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript; and the biennial Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards, given for five categories (short story set in Melbourne, Dorothy Porter Award for Emerging Poets, narrative non-fiction and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life writing and a feature category that invites underrepresented or marginalised writers).

The Stella Prize is a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, and an organisation that champions cultural change. The Stella Prize runs events at bookshops, festivals and universities around Australia. They also compile the annual Stella Count, tracking the number of books by men and women reviewed in some of Australia’s major newspapers and literary magazines. Each year, The Stella Prize awards one author with a $60,000 prize. Fiction, non-fiction and poetry books by women and non-binary writers are eligible for entry. This is an annual reward.

Melbourne-based organisations bestow a great many awards across a variety of literary niches, such as the Ned Kelly Awards, honouring the best Australian crime writing, the Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards for best female crime writer, the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Prize for essay writing, the Kat Muscat Fellowship is a fellowship that offers support and development to a young Australian writer and/or editor of an underrepresented gender, Children’s Book of the Year Awards recognises books of literary merit, recognising their contribution to Australian children’s literature, the Hachette Australia Prize for writers under 25 at Express Media, the thirty-year-running Alan Marshall Short Story Award and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

For these (and many more), check out Writers Victoria or their Opportunities and Competitions Calendar for updates.