The Postgraduate Prize for best conference paper is open to Postgraduate conference participants each year. The aim of the competition is to encourage excellence in research and scholarship in Creative Writing, and to reward Postgraduate research candidates participating in the AAWP conference for their achievements in writing exemplary conference papers. Prizes total $300 in vouchers, kindly donated by the Coop Bookshop.
2011:
There were eighteen entries this year, by far the highest number of entries since the prize began in 2007. From this highly competitive pool of papers, the judging panel was delighted to announce the results as follows:
HIGHLY COMMENDED:
James Vicars (University of New England)
‘Storying’ lives: biography as story and the ethical imagining and ‘holding’ of lives
WINNER:
Michael Richardson (University of Western Sydney)
Who Speaks? Torture and the Ethics of Voice
"Who Speaks? is a profound interrogation of the ethics of writing torture. Richardson refuses to hold himself apart from his writing, his choice of torture as subject, and the terrifying world we live in where ‘ethics twist in the inescapable affective dynamics of biopower’. This refusal to remain separate – the willingness to implicate himself, and by extension his reader – demonstrates great personal courage. While I don’t envy Richardson his journey, I admire him for exploring the human capacity to harm, something we too often turn away from. Richardson writes with eloquence and unflinching resolve, ordering his thoughts and arguments in a deeply considered, embodied and structurally potent way: a twist in three movements" (a judge’s comments).