A novel interrogating the reliability of memory has won the 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.

Kirsty lltners’ Depth of Field beat more than 220 entries from across Australia to take out the prestigious prize, which is hosted by UWA Publishing in association with the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Ms Iltners will receive a publishing contract and manuscript development with UWA Publishing and $10,000 in prize money courtesy of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. Her novel will be published by UWA Publishing in 2024.

Image: Kirsty Iltners, author of Depth of Field.

Previous winners of the Dorothy Hewett Award include Josephine Wilson, whose novel Extinctions went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Josh Kemp’s Banjawarn, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction and Kgshak Akec’s Hopeless Kingdom, which has been longlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award.

The judges for this year’s award were Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Chair in Australian Literature from UWA's School of Humanities, writer and podcaster Astrid Edwards, arts editor, critic and poet Thuy On and UWA Publishing manager Kate Pickard.

The judges described Depth of Field as a gripping novel where the camera becomes a narrative device for what is known and what escapes the frame.

“The mechanisms of photography are allowed to falter just enough to expose the fragility of the images and moments that make up life,” the judges said.

The Dorothy Hewett Award is open annually to all unpublished manuscripts of fiction, narrative non-fiction and poetry, inclusive of hybrid genres. The award will reopen for submissions in November 2023.

It is named in honour of Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002), who is considered one of Australia’s most important writers and whose work challenged the norms of 20th-century Australian culture.