Judges praised A Piece of Red Cloth as a ‘landmark achievement in fiction’, with Kate Wild, Zana Fraillon and Rohan Howitt also winning in their categories
A “landmark” novel written collaboratively by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytellers, fusing pre-colonial Yolngu oral history with western novelistic storytelling, has won the $80,000 Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction.
A Piece of Red Cloth, written by novelist Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs and Yolngu knowledge holders Djawundil Maymuru and Djawa Burarrwanga, is set in a coastal north-east Arnhem Land community in the 1600s, when Makassan fishers, from what we now know as Indonesia, would trade with the Yolngu people during the wet season.