Winning awards is nice, sometimes even life-changing, for our ever-growing group of acclaimed alumni authors.
But it’s the chance to create distinctively Tasmanian voices that is also motivating these writers.
For Katherine Johnson (PhD 2019), life changed overnight when she woke to find her photo on the front cover of The Australian’s Review in December last year. She’d just been announced as the inaugural winner of The Australian Fiction Prize, which included upcoming publication with HarperCollins.
It was the proudest moment of the author’s four-novel career, and another reminder that Tasmania’s stories are resonating nationally.
“In a world that is increasingly crowded and under pressure from environmental change, Tasmania is often seen as a beacon of wildness, calm and a fresh perspective,” Katherine said. “I think our island’s stories tap into this and are sought out because of it.”
It’s a view that other alumni writers can relate to. Robbie Arnott (BA, BBus 2012), who won Indie Book of the Year and the Australian Book Industry Awards’ fiction prize in 2025 for his latest novel, Dusk, says every culture should celebrate itself through stories.
“The churn of history has led to so many textures of places and people being erased or destroyed, and that ends up making life less interesting,” he said.
“So when you focus on the uniqueness and strangeness and all the things that make different cultures different, you start getting a much richer picture of life on earth.”
Kate Kruimink (BA 2013), a former Vogel Award winner, took the Premier’s Prize for Fiction at the Tasmanian Literary Awards this year and says writing is a way for smaller places with complex histories to shed a “cultural defensiveness”.
“It’s partly from being considered the mainland's poor cousin, but probably mostly from the fact that, for a long time, we worked on a kind of active forgetting of some of the worst crimes against humanity imaginable,” she said.
“I'm still working through that feeling of defensiveness.”
Written by David Beniuk for Alumni Magazine Issue 56, 2025.
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