First-time author makes history by winning richest literary prize – with a kids’ book

A first-time author has made history by taking out the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature with a picture book – the first time a children’s book has won the prestigious award.

Nukgal Wurra author and artist Wanda Gibson’s book Three Dresses, published by the University of Queensland, also won the $25,000 children’s prize for literature in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, which were announced in Melbourne on Wednesday evening.

Wanda Gibson, 79, has won the Victorian Prize for Literature at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.Credit: Clair Hume

Gibson, 79, lives in the Hope Vale Indigenous community in Far North Queensland and couldn’t be at the ceremony, but her son Bruce accepted the award on her behalf. Speaking by phone from Queensland, Gibson was surprised at the attention her book had received.

“I didn’t even know they put books in competitions,” she said.

The great-grandmother (she has five children, 11 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren) had never planned to write a book, but after taking up weaving and painting “about 12 or 13 years ago”, she completed a diploma of visual arts in 2014 and began to exhibit her work. After a collaboration with a local Indigenous social enterprise, she was approached by the University of Queensland Press to write a storybook.

Gibson never imagined it would lead to winning one of Australia’s biggest literature prizes. “I am shocked,” she said, adding that when she learnt she’d won the $25,000 category winner prize, she couldn’t believe it.

“I rang my son and said, ‘I’m shaking here’. He said, ‘What’s wrong, Mum? You sick?’ I said, ‘I’m shocked because I won this award’. He said, ‘It can’t be – it’s your first book!’”

The opening pages of Three Dresses by Wanda Gibson.Credit: UQP

Drawing on her childhood growing up on the Hope Vale mission, Three Dresses tells the story of Wanda and her family packing for a holiday. Families were allowed one break a year, and her family would camp at the beach. Her mother would tell them to bring “three dresses … one to wash, one to wear and one spare”. Illustrated by Gibson’s simple but striking paintings, it follows the family camping, swimming, cooking fish on the fire, and essentially enjoying freedoms usually denied to them.

The awards judges described Three Dresses as “a truth-telling woven with words” that “gives the reader the sense that the word ‘family’ is a verb meaning to experience freedom with glee”.

Other writers recognised at the awards included Jeanine Leane, who won the prize for poetry for her book Gawimarra, while the Indigenous writing prize went to Amy McQuire for Black Witness. Other winners included Fiona McFarlane for Highway 13 (fiction), Susan Hampton (non-fiction), Emma Lord (young adult) and Robert Skinner took the new John Clarke prize for humour writing.

As for the shocked winner, Gibson isn’t sure how she will spend her prize. “I don’t know because I never had that much money in my life,” she said.

“I’ll probably just spend it on the kids and ... give us a better life.”

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