Prizes and Scholarships

Information about prizes and scholarships awarded in the Department of English will be placed here as it becomes available.

David Harold Tribe Fiction Award - 2009

David Harold Tribe Fiction Award ($11,000)

The David Harold Tribe Fiction Award is a major new prize for short fiction and was run for the first time in 2009 through the Department of English. There was a strong field of 187 entries.

David Tribe is a philanthropist who has led a diverse and creative life. Born in Sydney, he lived for many years in the UK where he was a leading figure in liberal and creative arts movements during the seminal period of the 1960s and early ‘70s. He was chair of the Humanist Action Group, President of the National Secular Society, editor of the Freethinker, and a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties. He is the author of a dozen books on an astonishing range of subjects, from censorship, humanist ethics and free thought, to poetry, Shakespeare and the role of religion and ethics in education. Many of these books were published during his time in London.

Since returning to Australia, David has continued to work for secularist and humanist causes. In 2005 he approached the University of Sydney with a bequest that established the David Harold Tribe Awards, a suite of awards to encourage excellence in the fields of poetry, fiction, philosophy, sculpture and music. In 2008 the inaugural David Harold Tribe Poetry Award was presented to John Bennett for his poem, ‘Kitchen Music’.

On 11 November 2009 the department had the pleasure of presenting the inaugural David Harold Tribe Fiction Award to Patrick Mountford for his short story Theobald, Tailor.

There were two highly commended entrants:
Mark MacLean for Untenthenherenye? Where do you come from?
and
Jennifer Mills for The jungle will swallow anything.

The winning entry will be published in Southerly.