Queensland Literary awards: winners checklist displays ‘a second of change for the nation’ | Tradition

A e-book that began life as a love letter to the author’s new child son has received the 2022 Queensland Literary award for fiction.

Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You was awarded the $15,000 prize on Thursday. The third e-book in his sequence following the lifetime of character Bani Adam, it explores themes of masculinity versus patriarchy, and what it means to be a Muslim Australian male coming of age in western Sydney.

The political analyst and former journalist Quentin Beresford received the $25,000 prize for a piece of state significance, for Wounded Nation: The Murray-Darling Basin – a contested historical past.

The judges praised Wounded Nation for its readability and perception in the way in which it illustrated the entrenched political disregard for nature and science, the rights of First Nations individuals and their information of nation.

“The repeated mismanagement of this vital water useful resource is a metaphor for the historical past of colonisation,” the judges mentioned.

“Equally clear is the way in which ahead, caring for water, land, and folks.”

Beresford informed Guardian Australia he was motivated by his outrage after the mass death of fish in the Darling River in Menindee in 2019.

The denigration of the Murray-Darling Basin, he mentioned, destined by means of greed and political lying to show Australia’s meals bowl to a mud bowl, serves as a microcosm for environmental mismanagement on a world scale.

“It’s a case research of the broader drawback: a political unwillingness to create sustainable futures,” he mentioned.

“I’m not suggesting that loads of Australians aren’t involved about this. They’re, however what we’re preventing is the vested pursuits. They get their enamel into these industries, sew up the politics, and the politicians play alongside after which successfully the entire thing turns into too huge to fail.”

When Ahmad’s earlier novel The Lebs was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2019, he turned the primary Muslim author to ever be nominated for Australia’s most distinguished literary prize – a milestone he described to Guardian Australia as a “unhappy indictment” on the trade.

His win within the Queensland Literary awards was trigger for celebration, he mentioned, as a result of he was one in all 4 Muslim Australian writers to be recognised.

Yumna Kassab was shortlisted within the fiction class for Australiana; Amani Haydar was within the nonfiction class for The Mom Wound; and Sara El Sayed’s Muddy Individuals was a finalist in three classes, together with state significance, non-fiction and the $10,000 individuals’s alternative award, which was received by Chelsea Watego for One other Day within the Colony.

“Muslims have been part of Australian tradition and historical past for a whole bunch of years, even pre-colonisation,” Ahmad mentioned.

“I don’t need to sound too cynical or progressive-phobic, as a result of I recognise progress has been made and that’s an exquisite factor. However generally you are feeling prefer it’s taken a very very long time to occur.”

The Sydney creator mentioned it was notably gratifying that it was the state of Queensland that was recognising the contribution made by Australian Muslim and Arab writers.

Research from Charles Sturt University has discovered the ratio of reported anti-Muslim incidents in Queensland in 2018/2019 was 2.5 instances larger than the ratio of Muslim individuals to the remainder of the inhabitants; within the wake of the Christchurch mosque assault, the state recorded the best variety of vandalism incidents to mosques.

“Muslim Australians have an advanced relationship with the state of Queensland,” he mentioned.

“Within the creativeness of a number of Muslim Australians and Arab Australians it’s a xenophobic state that hates us, so to rejoice and recognise so many Arab and Muslim writers … marks a second of change for the nation and particularly the state of Queensland and its relationship to the Arab and Muslim neighborhood.”

Ahmad mentioned he started writing The Different Half of You on his iPhone whereas cradling his new child little one in Westmead hospital in 2015. The e-book developed as divisive and momentous occasions unfolded globally, together with the Black Lives Matter motion, Covid-19 and the 2019 Christchurch mosque bloodbath.

“I wrote it as a love letter to my son who’s combined race – Arab and Anglo Australian – and who has been raised in a multi-faith and multicultural dwelling. And I actually wished to write down it as a letter of coming collectively, a narrative of hope and a narrative of what our future can appear like once we do really come collectively.”

Greater than $230,000 was awarded to writers by the Queensland authorities on Thursday evening, with Claire G Coleman profitable the non-fiction class for Lies, Damned Lies and Felicity Castagna within the younger grownup class for Ladies in Boys’ Vehicles.

Kunyi June Anne McInerney received the kids’s class for her story and illustrations documenting her personal experiences as a survivor of the stolen generations.