The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (VPLAs) are an annual recongition of the best in Australian writing across nine categories, which this year includes the inaugural John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing. 2025 marks the prize's 40th year of celebrating great Australian writing – discover the winners for this significant year below, or find out more about the prize here.
VPLA Winner
Wanda Gibson's Three Dresses won the Children's Literature Prize, and was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature for her work Three Dresses, the first time a work from the Children’s Literature category has taken home the overall Victorian Prize for Literature!
Three Dresses
Wanda Gibson
'Take three dresses ... one to wash, one to wear and one spare.'
When Wanda Gibson was a little girl, her mum would tell her this as they packed to go on holidays. Wanda grew up on Hope Vale Mission in Far North Queensland, and her family were allowed only one short break away from work each year. They would walk for two days to get to their special spot at the beach. Here, they camped in the sandhills, cooked fresh fish on the fire and swam in the ocean.
Beautifully illustrated with Wanda's paintings, this heart-warming true story celebrates family time, connection to place and finding joy in the simple things, like your favourite three dresses.
Prize for Fiction
Highway 13
Fiona McFarlane
A gripping, haunting work about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people.
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders of backpackers along a highway. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further – into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.
Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more: through the investigation of the aftermath of this violence across time and place, from the killer's home town in country Australia to the tropical Far North, and to Texas and Rome, McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.
Prize for Non-fiction
Anything Can Happen
Susan Hampton
Warm and wry, mixing high culture and suburban realism, the laconic and the artful, Anything Can Happen is a memoir from one of Australia's literary trailblazers.
Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about storytelling and lies and how truth and memory are complex. It keeps in play so many things: irony and spirituality, a slice of social history of Sydney's inner west, a farm in Victoria, a lesbian subculture, Mardi Gras, the literary pleasures of teaching writing. Juxtaposition is her gift, as is the very natural speaking voice.
Please note, this title is current out of stock with the publisher and being reprinted.
Prize for Poetry
Gawimarra Gathering
Jeanine Leane
This superb collection moves from deeply tender meditations on Country, culture and kinship, to experimental archival poems dissecting the violence and destruction of the settler-colony.
Jeanine Leane's poems are richly palpable in texture, imagery and language, layering the personal with the political, along with a sharp-tongued telling of history. Cleverly divided into three parts, 'Gathering', 'Nation' and 'Returning', Gawimarra weaves back and forth in a dedication to strong matriarchs, and the core acts of gathering and returning - memory, language, history – resonate powerfully throughout.
Prize for Drama
37
Nathan Maynard
The local footy team of the small coastal town of Cutting Cove have spent so long at the bottom of the ladder they might as well be welded to it. This year, a new hope arrives for the Currawongs: the Marngrook cousins, Sonny and Jayma. Nicknamed after the Aboriginal game that inspired AFL, their natural talent promises the team's best chance at bringing the flag home for the first time ever. What will come with that flag, however, is the cruel reminder of a far greater loss in this country's colonial history.
Nathan Maynard's 37 serves up a searing critique of Australia's relationship with sport, set within the era of Adam Goodes' war cry and the country's ensuing debate on racism. In the land of the fair go, the rules of the game will always be fairer for some than others. Who decides these rules, when not everyone wants to play clean? Can you possibly ever win, when the system is rigged against you?
Prize for Indigenous Writing
Black Witness
Amy McQuire
A searing indictment of the media's failures in reporting Indigenous affairs – and a powerful corrective that shows how Black journalism can pave the way for equality and justice.
From one of this country's leading Indigenous journalists comes a collection of fierce and powerful essays proving why the media need to believe Black witnesses and showcasing ways that journalism can be used to hold the powerful to account and make the world a more equitable place.
Black Witness is the essential collection of First Nations journalism that we need right now – and always have.
Prize for Writing for Young Adults
Anomaly
Emma Lord
Piper Manning survived the apocalypse. Barely.
She recovered from the virus that killed millions, but it left behind a new, uncontrollable power that's forced her to isolate herself from others – for their sake.
Then an injured boy shows up at her mountain hideaway. And what hurt Seth is out to get her, too.
Now she's on the run, risking everything for a shot at an actual future. But to get there, she'll have to trust a stranger, control her abilities … and face her ghosts.
John Clarke Prize for Humour Writing
I'd Rather Not
Robert Skinner
I was sleeping in what might reasonably be described as a ditch, though I tried not to think of it in those terms for morale reasons …
Robert Skinner arrives in the city, searching for a richer life. Things begin badly and then, surprisingly, get slightly worse. Pretty soon he’s sleeping rough and trying to run a literary magazine out of a dog park. His quest for meaning keeps being thwarted, by endless jobs, beagles, house parties, ill-advised love affairs, camel trips and bureaucratic entanglements.
Sometimes a book catches the spirit of the times. I’d Rather Not is about work, escape and that something more we all need.
Robert Skinner's I’d Rather Not was also the winner of the People's Choice Award for 2025.
