A.D. Hope Prize
The A.D. Hope Prize is awarded annually for the paper judged to be the best paper delivered by a postgraduate student. The winner must be a member of ASAL who presented at the annual conference of the previous year (July ASAL conference or July Literary Convention). The paper is to be sent to the judging panel, in publishable form, after the conference (date to be announced each year).
The essay judged the winner of the A.D. Hope Prize will win a $500 bursary, and be considered for publication in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
The essay you submit must be a substantial re-writing/expansion of your conference paper. It should be the length of 4500-6000 words and be formatted in JASAL house-style.
Full terms and conditions are available here
A.D. Hope Prize 2027
The essay you submit must be based on your 2026 conference paper, developed and expanded into a scholarly journal article. This work must be fully referenced. All submissions should be between 4,500-6,000 words and are expected to follow formatting in JASAL house-style. Please note that conference papers in their original, unedited format will not be accepted.
The deadline for submissions to the A.D. Hope Prize is the 1st of December, 2026. To submit, please complete the entry form here.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out by reply email to the ASAL Prize Coordinator, Kate Noske ([email protected]).
More Information:
Previous Winners
2026 Stacey Roberts for “The Moon over Moller Street: Poetic ‘leavening’ of social realism in Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up”
2024 Jordi Infeld for “‘To weave into the future’: Elegy and Natalie Harkin’s Archival-Poetics”
and Rebekah Ward for “‘Overlapping Ellipses’: Angus & Robertson’s Promotion of books Across Borders”
Highly commended: Theodora Irini Germanos-Galanis, “Isle of Refuse: Reading beyond Carpentaria’s national-global allegory and reimagining the abject in world literatures from the south”.
2023 Kyle Kohinga “’Soil is a Toil Needing All to recoil’: Lionel Fogarty, Andrew Forrest, and the Settler-Colonial Georgic”
Highly commended: Alice Bellette: ‘White Nativity’: Reinscribing Aboriginal Land in the poetry of Araluen and Whittaker
2022 Samuel Cox for a fascinating and provocative reading of Patrick White’s Voss
2021 Annelise Roberts, “Knowing This Country: Confronting the Nuclear Uncanny in Aboriginal Life Writing”
Highly commended: Alice Grundy and Karl Ricker
2018 Valérie-Anne Belleflamme “Moving on metaphorical silk roads of intellectual trade”: Chinese aesthetics in Gail Jones’s Five Bells” – from CEREP Postcolonial Research Centre, English Department, University of Liège, Belgium
2017 Jonathan Dunk “Jacky Alone: The Explorer Myth and the Politics of Aboriginal Authorship”
2016 Shaun Bell “but even memory is fiction’: The
(fictional) Life and (self) Writing of Sumner Locke Elliott”
2014 Caroline Williamson “Beyond generation green: Jill Jones and the ecopoetic process”
2012 Michael Farrell ”Unsettling the Field: Christopher Brennan and Biodiversity”
2009 Duncan Hose “Instructions for an ideal Australian: John Forbes’s poetry of metaphysical etiquette”
2008 Scott Brewer ‘”A Peculiar Aesthetic”: Julia Leigh’s The Hunter and Sublime Loss’
2007 Joanne Jones “Dancing the Old Enlightenment” and Ben Miller “David Unaipon’s style of subversion” JASAL (Special Issue 2008)
2006 Julieanne Lamond “The Ghost of Dad Rudd: On the Stump” JASAL (2007)
2005 Catriona Ross “Prolonged Symptoms of Cultural Anxiety: The Persistence of Narratives of Asian Invasion within Multicultural Australia” JASAL 5 (2006)
2004 Sandra Knowles “The Not Quite Real Miles Franklin: Diaries as Performance” JASAL 4 (2005)
