Arts prize winners and finalists – quick links:
Visual arts: prize winners
Four-time Archibald Prize finalist Loribelle Spirovski has won the Archibald Prize 2025 ANZ People’s Choice award for her portrait of William Barton, a virtuoso of the yidaki, also known as the didgeridoo. The portrait was made entirely using a finger-painting technique. Finger painting of William Barton is a tribute to Barton, a Kalkadunga man and internationally acclaimed composer, who has transformed perceptions of the yidaki through his pioneering work in classical and contemporary music.
Spirovski first met Barton last October at a concert featuring both Barton and Spirovski’s spouse, concert pianist Simon Tedeschi. Spirovski said she was taken by Barton’s presence, strength and wisdom and was certain she would paint him. At the time of the sitting, Spirovski was recovering from a nerve injury that left her struggling to paint.
‘When it came time to work on William’s portrait, I played his composition “Birdsong at dusk”. As the music began, my hand set the brush aside and I dipped my finger into the soft, pliant paint. I turned the volume up, the music guiding me. Without a brush, painting was almost painless. As the portrait painted itself, I felt alive in a way I hadn’t for a very long time,’ says Spirovski.
Riley Swanson on the Roma Southern Road by Carly Earl has won this year’s Australian Life photography competition. The image depicting young drovers on an old stock route in rural Australia won the picture editor a $10,000 cash prize, after being selected from 30 finalists.
First place winner from the teenage entrants was Callum Poling for February Boat Carnival, taking home $2000 and an OM System professional pack worth around $2500.
Winners of the 2025 Environmental Art & Design Prize are The ArtHitects (Gary Carsley and Renjie Teoh) in the Art category, Joanne Odisho in the Design category, Anahid Mezoghlian and Angie Xu as joint winners in the Young Artist/Designer seven to 12 years category and Meera Nirmalendran in the Young Artist/Designer 13 to 18 years category. The ArtHitects and Odisho each receives $20,000, while the young winners receive a total of $3000.
The finalists’ exhibition is on view at Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Curl Curl Creative Space and Mona Vale Creative Space Gallery from 1 August to 14 September.
Performing arts
Emele Ugavule and Lyall Brooks are recipients of Monash University Performing Arts Centres’ Progress Links Commissions, providing $5000 with a five to 10-day residency in 2025-2026 to develop a ‘proof of concept’ proposal to create new works for the MPAC program.
Ugavule will be developing a new experimental one-woman cabaret piece, Drau ni Uto Hotel, which explores the intersecting realities of Indigenous temporal sovereignty, memory erasure, and environmental destruction through the lived experience of Kali, a laundry attendant working in a luxury resort built on her grandfather’s land.
Brooks has over 25 years’ experience across stage and screen, and will develop SELF/LESS, which asks ethical questions about the future of reproductive technology, identity and emotional responsibility.
Amyl and the Sniffers took the lead at this year’s AIR Awards, receiving three awards for Independent Album of the Year, Best Independent Rock Album or EP for Cartoon Darkness, and Independent Song of the Year for U Should Not Be Doing That.
Alice Ivy also took out three awards for Best Independent Dance/Electronica Album or EP and Independent Producer Team of the Year for Do What Makes You Happy, and Best Independent Dance/Electronica or Club Single with Do I Need To Know What Love Is? Feat. Josh Teskey.
The 2025 Outstanding Achievement Award went to David Brodie for his work through Wantok Musik Foundation. View the full list of winners.
Writing and publishing: prize winners
Abbas El-Zein’s memoir Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars (Upswell Publishing) wins the $25,000 National Biography Award, presented by the State Library of NSW. Bullet, Paper, Rock charts El-Zein’s life through war, loss and migration, anchored by his enduring love of languages.
Senior Judge Sylvia Martin says: ‘The judges were unanimous in choosing Bullet, Paper, Rock as the winner of this year’s award. Abbas El-Zein’s extraordinary memoir stood out in a diverse and creatively original field for the way it covers a vast terrain in a unique narrative style of short, dazzling ‘literary forays’. He has produced a singular literary achievement: a vitally important geopolitical story worth reading for the luminous and precise quality of the prose alone.’
This year’s $5000 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work was presented to Nikos Papastergiadis for John Berger and Me (Giramondo Publishing), a memoir of the deep friendship between Papastergiadis, the eminent Australian sociologist, and John Berger, the late English writer and art critic.
From a longlist of 11 short stories – selected from over 1200 entries across 35 countries – judges Julie Janson, John Kinsella, and Maria Takolander have awarded the 2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize to ‘Shelling’ by Tara Sharman from Victoria, who at 22 is the youngest ever winner of an ABR prize. Sharman receives $6000 for her winning story, which follows a woman seeking to come to terms with the death of her father, driving over the course of a day and night with his abducted body.
Sam Quyên Huỳnh, 21, has won the 2025 State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award for their short story ‘Offerings’. The judges praised this story as ‘filled with beautifully observed sisterly moments, assured in its storytelling and the ways it explores memories’. Huỳnh says: ‘I feel so incredibly lucky to have won such a generous prize.
You may never know the ways your writing can touch people.’ The prie includes $2000 from State Library plus free membership with Queensland Writers Centre. The runners-up are Tali Lum Wan, Hasara Ekanayake and Iris Monod.
Read: The Creators 2025: 7 Australian screenwriters selected for program
Serena Moss, a startling talent brand new to writing competitions, is this year’s Furphy Literary Award winner for her entry ‘The Eulogy Business’. Moss receives $15,000 and publication in The Furphy Anthology 2025 (out in late November), along with the other 15 shortlisted stories.
‘The Eulogy Business’ is about a person who makes their living writing eulogies, advertising on Gumtree under ‘creative services’ but most of the jobs come through word of mouth.
FLA judge Anson Cameron says of the winning entry: ‘Your hope when you’re reading a story entered into a competition like this is that you’ll eventually hear a voice, a new voice, a voice both profound and hilarious, a true voice that makes you listen wholeheartedly and joyously, a voice that might become a name … a name in Australian literature. The judges heard that voice while reading this story.’
Runner up was Charlotte Askew for ‘Somewhere Above the Artesian’ with Amy Montague in third place for ‘All the Moments I Still Live In’.
Griffith Review revealed James Aird, Phoebe Cannard-Higgins, Shelley Eves and Miriam Webster as winners of its 2025 Emerging Voices competition. The four winning works will be published across Griffith Review editions in 2026.
Check out previous Opportunities and Awards wraps for more announcements.
